New Play in Manhattan

Chalked Out (by Lewis E. Lawes & Jonathan Finn).

Warden Lawes has been the fatherly director of Sing Sing Prison for 17 years. In all these years the Warden has kept not only a steady hand and an open heart, but a warm and sympathetic literary point of view which produced in 1932 a non-fiction best-seller called Twenty Thousand Years in Sing Sing. Not until he collaborated on Chalked Out, however, had Warden Lawes undertaken to rattle the cup dramatically on his 2,500 punks, wolves and right guys.

The punks (youthful perverts) and wolves (incorrigibles) in Chalked Out are definitely in the minority. In their clean, sturdy barracks most of the inmates and all of the guards behave a good deal like the amiable and manly V. M. I. officers and guards of Brother Rat (TIME, Dec. 28). But Frank Wilson (Charles Jordan) and Scappa (Maurice Burke) are nobody's angels. Frank has murdered a man in a stickup with a gun he got Johnny Stone (John Raby) to steal from his sister's sweetheart, a Holmes patrolman. Frank seems pretty smart to Johnny when he gets the two of them sent up for three years for a $10 robbery so they can hide out until the trouble blows over. But Johnny begins to crack when his sister's sweetheart is convicted of the murder and sent up to the death house. Frank persuades him that the only thing to do is to go over the wall with him and Scappa, who has got hold of two guns. Frank's private plan is to shoot Johnny as soon as they are outside.

As a matter of statistics, only two men have successfully escaped from Sing Sing since Warden Lawes has been there. He does not damage that record in Chalked Out, but neither has he enhanced his literary record with a show whose melodramatic iconoclasms will doubtless fare better in the films.

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