New Plays in Manhattan

Plumes in the Dust (by Sophie Treadwell; Arthur Hopkins, producer). The theatre enjoys better-mannered audiences than baseball, prize fighting and grand opera, but there are occasions when, on the stage, a playwright's line overshoots its dramatic mark and hits the audience on the funnybone. At Plumes in the Dust, which presents Actor Henry Hull as Edgar Allan Poe, one of several such shots occurred last week when Poe confessed to Elmira Shelton that he had been drinking, and Elmira, looking with tragic concern at his haggard face, exclaimed: ''Oh, Edgar, will you Take the Pledge -- for me?"

Edgar Allan Poe returns as an undergraduate from the University of Virginia where he has been drinking and gambling, not because he enjoyed such sports but because he was sent there without sufficient money and because there were no letters from Elmira. Meanwhile Elmira has married, having received no letters from him, although he wrote to her every day. What happened to the letters is not explained. Poe's foster father, who comports himself like Simon Legree with a Scotch burr, sends him away. He goes to live with Mrs. Clemm and her 13-year-old daughter Virginia, whom any shock is likely to kill because her arteries are "as thin as tissue paper." When Poe is offered a magazine job in Richmond, Virginia faints. Poe finds her so beautiful while she is unconscious that he decides to marry her.

Poe's fine disregard of mere money is exhibited in his rage at being presented a $50 story prize rather than a $25 poetry prize. The hostility which his literary criticism met in later years may actually have been due to the philistinism of his times, but in the play it appears mainly due to his idea that the U. S. literary scene consists of Edgar Allan Poe. He invades a party in the famed salon of Anne Lynch in Manhattan, threatens to thrash a man who is slandering his character, starts drinking from the punch bowl instead. His recital of The Raven is interrupted, inevitably, by news of his child wife's death. In 1849 he visits Elmira, then a widow, but his attempt at a reunion fails because she believes he wants to start an ill-tempered magazine with her money. From beginning to end of the last scene, Actor Hull is required to utter a delirious monolog while he heaves and writhes on his deathbed and a nurse reads from the Bible.

Mr. Hull works like a ditchdigger for three acts, manages by artful makeup to achieve a good likeness (see cut, p. 89) to the unhappy genius who wrote, among other things, a poem called The Raven. These commendable efforts go unrewarded, for Plumes in the Dust seems to be concerned with an unpleasant man surrounded by unpleasant people, presented with all the dramatic impact of a glass of sour milk.

Forbidden Melody (book & lyrics by Otto Harbach; music by Sigmund Romberg; Kirkland & Grisman, producers) is a spavined specimen of that old theatrical wheelhorse, the operetta. Laid in a complicated Balkan kingdom, it tries to be sentimental, succeeds only in being arch. It contains a surprise, Comedienne Ruth Weston singing. Carl Brisson, a large, broad-faced Dane who was once a pugilist, accomplishes both song and dance, has such fidgety legs that he seems to be dancing even when he is not supposed to. Brightest spots are the singing of such amiable Romberg tunes as "No Use Pretending" and "Blame It All on the Night" by Ruby Mercer, comely soprano from St. Louis' Municipal Opera Company, and eccentric dances by a small girl named June Havoc.

Against scenery by Sergei Soudeikine which looks vaguely edible, Forbidden Melody unfolds a tangled tale of intrigue and counter-intrigue revolving about the return of King Carol of Rumania to his throne. No one impersonating buck-toothed Carol appears, however, and there is no trace of his red-headed familiar, Magda Lupescu. Sample gag: "Will you pardon me?" "Why certainly--what have you done?"

Don't Look Now (by John Crump; Gustav Blum, producer). Author Crump's last effort produced on Broadway was a play called Hipper's Holiday, which lasted four performances. Having doubtless observed that Once in a Lifetime, Twentieth Century, Personal Appearance and Boy Meets Girl, which dealt laughably with the foibles of Hollywood, were well received, Mr. Crump has written a play about a heavily-accented cinemagnate who gets into great and voluble trouble because his blonde star skips out in the middle of a picture, leaving him with a "nut" (overhead) of $10,000 per day. Don't Look Now differs very considerably from Once in a Lifetime, Twentieth Century, Personal Appearance and Boy Meets Girl, principally by not being funny.

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