New Plays in Manhattan

Return Engagement (by Lawrence Riley, produced by W. Horace Schmid-lapp & Joseph M. Gaites) is a comedy about one of those summer theatres where a good rain on the roof renders the actors inaudible beyond the fifth row. The Stockton (Connecticut) Players are giving a triangle play called The Usual Three and, as might be expected, the onstage geometry has its offstage counterpart. The visiting leading lady is the ex-wife of the visiting leading man. She gradually realizes that this ham is still pretty much her meat.

His flavor is also enjoyed by the patroness of the theatre.

Bert Lytell gives a savory performance as the ham and Evelyn Varden is comic as the fat directrix of the players who rehearses to the refrain of "Nuts in May, nuts in May!" a dance intended to enliven one of the morbid dramas of Chekhov. But as a whole this supposedly sparkling little vehicle by the author of the 1934 comedy hit Personal Appearance gives off about as much electricity as a horse car.

Fighting-chinned Bert Lytell, now 55, made his New York debut in 1914 with Marie Dressier in A Mix-Up. During World War I he toured U. S. cities on a tank, selling Liberty bonds, while Singer Harry Richman, then a sailor, bawled The Rose of No Man's Land. In Manhattan Lytell may often be seen, inside three sweat shirts, circling the Central Park reservoir. Oldtime matinee idolizers often say that Bert Lytell's profile hasn't changed in 20 years. It hasn't.

Suzanna and the Elders (by Lawrence Langner & Armina Marshall, produced by Jack Kirkland) tells the tale of one of the many little "Bible socialism" colonies that flourished in the U. S. in the iQth Century. This typical but fictional one, at Harmony Heights, Mass., is devoted to a sharing economy based on the sale of animal traps to the outer world, and to selective breeding designed to do for man "what has long been done for horses, swine and potatoes." The economy breaks down with the advent of a handsome inventor from Yale whose mass-production machinery gives the less hardened socialists their first idea of a capitalist paradise.

The selective breeding strikes a snag when golden-haired Suzanna, chosen to mate with one of the elders who heavily depends on "signs" from on high, prefers instead the young inventor, who has no need of heavenly go signals.

Several seasons ago the authors of Suzanna wrote a funny play about bundling --The Pursuit of Happiness. In Suzanna they waver uncertainly between pale comments on the folly of socialist hopes in a world which loves to squat on a dime, and rather skittish comedy derived from the idea of a human stud farm.

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