New Plays in Manhattan

Marching Song (by John Howard Lawson; presented by the Theatre Union).

Item: on the vague promise of a job, a horde of unwitting men are assembled, loaded into trucks, locked in. When they arrive at their destination, they discover that they have been taken into a strike town as strikebreakers.

Item: a wayfaring crusader for the Cause is branded by the orange growers of California, whipped and fired on elsewhere during his eastward trek.

Item: a happy-go-lucky Negro (Rex Ingram) gets so tired of being kicked around that he reads the Constitution to learn his rights.

Item: after a cruel compromise has crushed an automobile workmen's union, a union lieutenant (Grover Burgess), fired, blacklisted and evicted from his home, is so demoralized that he takes to drinking, abusing his baby, patronizing 25-c- brothels.

Item: a crowd of strike sympathizers is gassed and machine-gunned by hired thugs.

Item: an old Italian woman who passes food to sit-down strikers is threatened with deportation as an alien--although there is no charge of illegal entry into the U. S.

Item: a reptilian professional strikebreaker (Manart Kippen) tortures a union leader with hot irons.

Item: a foul-mouthed police inspector (Stanley G. Wood) laughs heartily at every fresh evidence of human distress.

Thus does Marching Song deal with a sit-down strike in an automobile town called Brimmerton. As will be evident from the partial inventory above of its dramatic materials, it is not a hastily concocted case history of the General Motors strike in Flint (TIME, Jan. 11 et seq.). It is a proletarian fairy tale in unrelieved black & white. Viewed from within its own wonderland it is vivid enough to enlist sympathy for the good fairies in their struggles against the hobgoblins. The play's nightmarish atmosphere is enhanced by Howard Bay's vast, sombre setting which represents the interior of an abandoned factory, dominated by the gutted carcass of a huge dynamo.

Having Wonderful Time (by Arthur Kober; Marc Connelly, producer), the season's pleasantest institutional drama, is laid in one of the numerous cheap summer camps for New York Jews which dot the Berkshires. Those who have not visited such a resort as Camp Kare-Free may already be familiar with the nature of its patrons through Arthur Kober's piteous, humorous, sharply observed New Yorker reports, collected in book form as Thunder over The Bronx, on the year-round behavior of one-sixth of New York City's population.

Camp Kare-Free's guests are both funny and pathetic. Exhausted from a 50-week grind in city offices, they are pitiably anxious to have fun on their precious fortnight's vacation, to put their best foot forward with the other guests, perhaps even to find a wife or husband, for Proprietor Abe Tobias offers a free honey moon the following year to any couple whose troth is plighted at Kare-Free. There is Henrietta Brill, a fat girl with Communist tendencies. There is Miriam Robbins who shamefully chases after Pinkie Aaronson, who owns two hat shops, wears solid silk pajamas and has a way with the "pigeons" (girls). There is good-hearted Fay Fromkin, whose girl friend, a late comer, is Teddy Stern (Katherine Locke). Teddy, an unsure, shy little typist with a great desire for gentility, is glad to get away from home for the first time, glad to escape her mother's nagging about the way Sam Rappaport jilted her after they had been going steady for three years.

Teddy and one of the waiters, a clean college fellow named Chick Kessler (Jules Garfield), meet and quarrel at first, then begin to take an interest in each other in the moonlight when he delivers a little essay about all values being relative and she proudly recites a few lines from Trees. How they then fall out over Pinkie Aaronson and later make up is a tender and amusing tale rendered with penetrating realism. In the enthusiastic first audience were Cinema Producers Darryl Zanuck of Twentieth Century-Fox and B. P. Schulberg. auguring that Playwright Kober and Producer-Director Connelly, who has not turned his hand to so promising a theatrical venture since The "Green Pastures, might acquire feathers not only for their caps but for their nests is well.

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