New Plays

The Wild Westcotts. For the space of two hours every evening the public is now privileged to follow the firecracker sputtering of the Westcott family in a new comedy of domestic infelicity. Anne Morrison, actress, is the author, and it is rather more than evident that Miss Morrison keeps an ear to the open window to catch her neighbors' squabbles. The chief merit in the play is the fierce joy you can derive by turning to Aunt Jane beside you and disturbing all within hearing distance with the obvious query: "Isn't that just like the Sullivans?"

As far as plot is concerned there really isn't much of any. People fall in love with the wrong people and are noisily reprimanded. The servant in the house, played expertly by Helen Broderick, causes most of the laughter. Vivian Martin, Elliott Nugent and Cornelia Otis Skinner add favorable contributions.

Alexander Woollcott: "To the cautious playgoer craving advice as to whether he ought to put it on his list, one can only say that it wouldn't hurt him any and that he might find it quite entertaining."

Neighbors. After injecting a vigorous stimulant into the flagging hopes of their numerous supporters with a wholly admirable production of Queen Victoria (TIME, Nov. 26), the Equity Players resorted to this discouraging domestic farce.

The plot tangles two adjacent families in domestic turmoil because the prize rooster of the one feeds furtively upon the prize onions of the other. A capable cast fumbles hopelessly with the awkward assignment of material.

Percy Hammond: "One of those dramas which some will like and some won't."

Alexander Woollcott: "A grievous disappointment."

Saint Joan. A curiously conglomerate compound is this latest Shaw play which the Theatre Guild brought out last week in the most gorgeous of red, gray and gold bindings. Some of the chapters are conceived in all the author's shameless artfulness as a melodramatist. Some of them are born of Shaw's inevitable penchant for controversial conversation. Christianity is alternately belabored and immortalized. History is consistently in caricature. These moods and many more are bundled into three full hours of changing action. Viewed as a whole, the play tantalizes. It is a stimulant and a drug mixed in the same crock.

Four acts and an epilogue, subdivided into seven scenes, are required for the author's development of Joan from country maid to Saint. At the outset she appears at Vaucouleurs, where with a few brief sentences she persuades the testy Robert de Baudricourt to grant her soldiers and a horse to carry her to the Dauphin closeted at Chinon. Her recognition of the latter in the crowded throne room, his conversion to her standard follow. Shaw then revels in an arrant trumpery when he changes before your eyes the course of a contrary wind--the Maid's "miracle" on joining the French forces before Orleans.

The audience is then escorted through the lines and presented to the English leaders. Coming as it does in the exact middle of the play, the interminable conversation put into their mouths seems the grossest of dramatic errors. If the talk were bright and new there might be justification; for the most part it is repetition of the author's well-known tenets on England and on Christianity.

A brief glimpse of the Ambulatory of Rheims Cathedral, immediately after the crowning of the Dauphin Charles VII of France, depicts the beginning of Joan's fall. In the following trial scene at Rouen, she is condemned by the church and burned at the stake (off stage) for a heretic.

Shaw then saw fit to explain significances. He composed a ponderous epilogue bringing the characters together in a dream which drifted down the centuries. They settled the merits of martyrdom and all but settled the play. Possibly Shaw preferred to have his audience leave the theatre with wrinkled brow rather than glistening eye. Possibly he deliberately stepped on his climax because he is Shaw and defies the rules.

Winifred Lenihan was selected by the Guild to play Joan, despite obvious physical demerits. She is small, not the least masculine. Yet, looking back, it is impossible to picture the play without her performance. It seemed spiritually inspired, valiantly sustained, utterly convincing. The remainder of the cast maintain the enviable standard of the Guild productions. The designing in settings and costumes by Raymond Sovey rank at the head of the season's stage investitures.

Alexander Woollcott: "A deathless legend come to life again, quickened by the performance of a play that has greatness in it."

Percy Hammond: "Just another example of Shaw's gift for interminable rag chewing."

Heywood Broun: "It is, in our judgment, the finest play written in the English language in our day. ... a play for the ages, and to them it will belong once Mr. Shaw has died. It will then be possible to cut from it that which is tedious and overly sentimental and woefully verbose."

Mary Jane McKane. Mary Hay has been chiefly known as the wife of Richard Barthelmess, cinema star. One suspects that her extraordinarily effective activity in this new musical piece may shift the balance. The play is unquestionably the best musical comedy currently exhibiting on Broadway. And Miss Hay, despite her moderate equipment as a vocalist and as a dancer, is unquestionably the best of the play.

The play proves, as has been so often proved before, that no stenographer should marry her employer saving she is industrious, intelligent and plain. Miss Hay pulls her hair flat and conceals herself behind shell spectacles to fulfill the last consideration. Proving her industry and intelligence is easy. She is therefore married for herself alone.

Hal Skelley, a particularly able comedian much handicapped in the past with inadequate material, is steadily and explosively amusing. A third individual, one Kitty Kelly but lately elevated from the chorus, displays stirring possibilities as a comedienne. Music, color and dancing are supplied in wholesale lots of excellent quality. Hence the nomination of Mary Jane McKane as the pick of the musical comedy basket.

The New York World: "Almost anyone should be pleased with Mary Jane McKane. Especially those who do not care who writes our country's songs, just so long as they may laugh at its comedy."

Percy Hammond: "I liked it as well as anything of its kind in years."

The Blue Bird. Memory holds few modern plays in higher esteem than this gorgeous fantasy of Maeterlinck's. The very name worked its way into the language as a symbol of happiness. Childhood a dozen years ago was incomplete without a visit to its wonderland.

Accordingly, a report on the present revival must be chiefly a comparison. The production seems in every way worthy of its great original. Particularly in the bewildering beauty of its settings, lights, costumes is it notable. The cast, lacking great names, has an even quality of excellence which is the basis of any finely balanced production.

Further than this little can be said. No parent should deprive a child of the privilege of attendance. It might even be a good plan to take Nurse along for a glimpse of hitherto undreamed-of beauty.

The Alarm Clock tells the old, old story of the family from Camm's Corners which came to the metropolis and promptly became more metropolitan than the oldest inhabitant.

Their objective was the menage of Bobby Brandon, casual bachelor, whose life they learned was rapidly disintegrating before the combined attack of champagne and chorus girls. When they arrived they might well have been a group plucked bodily from the comic supplement and placed behind the footlights. But in the next act Aunt Susie Kent (Blanche Ring) looked a good deal like Blanche Ring in the midst of a Winter Garden show. Daughter Mary, of course, had blossomed into the full beauty which flourishes under the genial warmth of the White Light midnight sun. Her engagement to Homer Wickham, around whose face Camm's Corners whiskers lingered doggedly, was disposed of when Homer and his recently inherited fortune were absorbed by a Follies girl. Bachelor Bobby Brandon and Mary thereupon fell into a clinch from which they were extricated by the immediate lowering of the curtain.

While Miss Ring was possibly a bit strident, her reward for hard, conscientious work was a substantial tribute of guffaws. Bruce McRae played Bobby Brandon as only he knows how; for that type of part he has no peer on the native stage. In the face of this experienced opposition it is vastly to the credit of Marion Coakley (Daughter Mary) that she seemed just a trifle better than any single feature of the not too engrossing exercises.

Percy Hammond: "Regret to report that few carols may be sung in approval of The Alarm Clock.

Alan Dale: "Just ticked itself along gently."

This Fine Pretty World. With the avowed intention of preserving behind the translucent glass of the Theatre some of their race idiosyncrasies, Percy Mackaye took up his temporary abode among the primitive peoples of the Kentucky mountains. The results of his explorations were revealed last week in a sinewy tragedy within the secluded precincts of the Neighborhood Playhouse. Critics cavilled slightly at his tendency to inject cosmic significance into his characters' activities. Otherwise they judged the play an important contribution to the season's drama.

The story deals with the efforts of a dirty, bearded mountaineer to rid himself of his querulous wife and seven children in favor of a red-haired mountain flapper. He bribes his witless nephew to swear to certain indiscretions of the wife to render her divorceable.

New York Tribune: "A tragedy . . . that does not leave one overly depressed."

Madre. A doleful tale of the insufficiency of marriage is herein unfolded. The author is a Spaniard, Rafael Marti Orbera. Those whose preconceptions of Spain are inextricably confused with the crackle of castanets and the present vogue in Spanish shawls are faced with fearful disappointment. The tragedy of the play is quite unrelieved; it is almost Russian. The plot depicts the domestic chaos consequent upon the return from the wars of Fidel and his attempted seduction of his sister-in-law. His brother, her husband, finally slips a knife into Fidel's left ventricle. The acting is inadequate despite the presence of the more or less heralded Nance O'Neil. The single satisfactory feature is the farmhouse setting.

The Rise of Rosie O'Reilly. George M. Cohan is responsible for this obvious "defy" to the Ku Klux Klan. He has been responsible for several others from the same mould in the past few seasons.

The young Irish heroine starts as a poor newsgirl under the Brooklyn Bridge. She ends up wife and heir to the Morgan millions. This simple tale is unfolded amid a frenzy of dancing, rather unimpressive music, vast displays of color and a sprinkling of humor. Thousands of the public flocked to Little Nellie Kelly; the same thousands will doubtless jam the benches of the Liberty Theatre to enjoy the upward curve of Rosie's fortune.

The New York Times: ". . . though the piece is designed for millions upon millions (Mr. Cohan is far too wise to write as well as he knows how), there are moments in it that are A-1 Cohan."

Hurricane. "Of Petrova, by Petrova, and for Petrova" might be summoned as a phrase to explain this curiously tragical mixture. The handsome Olga wrote it last year and played it for the first time last week. It is obviously an "actory" part, conceived by one more cunning in stage interpretation than in stage creation. Yet through it runs an uneven strain of fierce vitality. For the moments when this strain is uppermost the play is valuable.

An immigrant girl from a Texas farm departs to the more entertaining surroundings of the St. Louis slums. A year or two of this and she is almost done. She forces an exit, and we next see her as a successful business woman in New York. On the eve of an advantageous marriage, she is overtaken by a lurking virus of her earlier obliquity, is driven to suicide.

Like the play Petrova's performance was uneven. Yet so very well did she comport herself in the essential moments that her work seemed to many the best of her career.

Roseanne. The Negro is one of the comic traditions of our native drama. Accordingly, the producers of this serious study of Southern life run the risk of casting a paradox in the public teeth. Visitors to whom Shuffle Along is the alpha and omega of Negro theatricals may be annoyed at the sturdy significance of Roseanne. For it seems to be one of the more important components of the current theatrical constituency. The story deals with the religious rascality of a Negro priest. In the midst of a howling revival meeting, word comes that he has seduced a girl. Promptly the galvanic emotion of his congregation is transmuted from thoughts of personal salvation to a desire for their preacher's temporal destruction.

Every character in the piece is black. For the most part Southern actors were recruited for the roles. The cast displays a collective competence, led by the capable Chrystal Herne in the name part.