New Plays

Sandro Botticelli. The play opens like a fancy dress ball. On the minute stage of the Provincetown Theatre are assembled people dressed up as Leonardo da Vinci, Lorenzo dei Medici, Fra Filippo Lippi, Sandro Botticelli and all manner of other notables of renaissance Florence. It is all very ingenious and very amusing. But the joke is run into the ground. All these grotesque masqueraders begin to take themselves seriously. You think you were wrong about the fancy dress. Casting sidelong glances about the garden of Lorenzo, you nervously seek the uniformed attendant. At any moment, you feel, some ardent damsel may rush on shouting: "I'm an egg! Watch me scramble."

The big moment of the play--by Maurice Hewlett's Quatrocentisteria, out of a legend of Botticelli--is when the beautiful Simonetta, offering to pose for the painter, comes to his studio, clad only in a cloak. Flinging the cloak from her she reveals herself to him, clothed only in a high-backed chair. Forgetting his love for her in his artistic enthusiasm for her beauty, Botticelli leaps to the canvas and starts violently sketching. It appears, however, that as a matter of fact Simonetta is not concerned so much with passing her beauty on to posterity. Her wants are far more human and immediate. So, seeing the lover submerged in the artist, she stamps her little foot and sweeps out into the stormy night. Shortly thereafter, Simonetta dies of a broken heart and a cold in the head, while Botticelli immortalizes her body in a picture.

The magnificent opportunity for tragi-comedy of the highest order is buried under an avalanche of rhetoric and pseudo-romance. Miss Mercedes de Acosta, the author, is both beautiful and young. Time may bring her a richer fruition of talents.

Heywood Broun: ". . . . emotionally shortweight."

Alexander Woollcott: ". . . . the verge of the ridiculous."

Percy Hammond: "... a young play."

The Enchanted Cottage. You may fall in love with a girl because she is beautiful. Or you may think that she is beautiful because you are in love with her. The latter is the interesting case with the war-battered wreck who marries a plain but good-hearted girl in order to keep his intrusive sister from coming to look after him, and then falls in love with her.

The play proves two things--first, that Pinero has not the genius for fantasy of James M. Barrie; second, that the author of The Second Mrs. Tanqueray is neither too old nor lacking in the skill to enter a field totally strange to him and turn out a play which, lacking the slightest touch of inspiration, is interesting from beginning to end.

The incomparable Katherine Cornell is, as usual, an event. By dint of her supreme artistry and a lot of make-up she contrives to look only moderately lovely as the ugly bride.

Kenneth Macgowan: ". . . mildly interesting and thoroughly annoying."

Percy Hammond: "... a destination for the more fastidious."

Heywood Broun: ". . . gallant attempt at fantasy by a man without much imagination."

The Wasp. There is no particular reason why this isn't a good mystery melodrama. It just isn't. There are all requisite elements of success; a storm, stolen bonds, a shot in the dark, a missing diary, a faithful younger brother, echoes of a mother weeping on the farm for the prodigal who doesn't return.

Otto Kruger gives a notable performance in two impossible parts--the murdered profligate and his avenging brother.

John Corbin: ". . . stung."

Kenneth Macgowan: ". . . stung."

Alan Dale: ". . . stung."