New Play in Manhattan

Sabrina Fair (by Samuel Taylor) is a passable comedy of manners much enhanced by a polished production. Treating of the Long Island rich, it is also romantic comedy about a young lady with three suitors. The young lady (Margaret Sullavan) is a chauffeur's daughter, brought up among two of her swains, and now back home, chic and socially hep, after working five years in Paris. Which man Sabrina wants is clear enough, but there is a family problem about his marrying beneath him, and a personal problem, since he does not want to marry at all.

Despite Actress Sullavan's adroitness and Joseph Cotten's ease, the romance seems pretty thin-spun and forced. As is so often true in drawing-room comedy, the secondary characters are the most fun. Mr. Cotten's Tory father (delightfully played by John Cromwell) seems a wittier cousin of the late George Apley, while Cathleen Nesbitt, as a great lady who purrs, and Luella Gear, as a career woman who drips acid, also add to the brightness.

Playwright Taylor has a nice ear for lines, a sharp eye for manners. But his heroine never quite takes shape, and his plot seems too much without being enough. But if Sabrina is only fair, H. C. Potter's staging gives it a decided fillip.

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