New Plays

New Toys. Though the authors of this comedy had no hand in The First Year, it might be called The Second Year. Like most sequels, it is comparatively weak. Authors Milton Herbert Cropper and Oscar Hammerstein, II, have taken a young couple for whom two years of marriage and the arrival of the baby have rubbed life the wrong way.

Ernest Truex gives a telling, life-like performance, makes his very silences work for him. It is unerringly deft acting, but seems to belong to another play.

The Chiffon Girl. The libretto is inanely dull. Its saving grace is Eleanor Painter, distinguished among prima 'donnas by personal daintiness and a sterling silver voice. Her ability is wasted in this papier-mache production. George Reimherr, tenor, is another oasis in a desert of vapidity. Some melodious numbers nourish the anemic book.

Antony and Cleopatra. History's foremost vampire has been endowed by Jane Cowl with bobbed hair and modern evening gowns. Shakespeare's play as produced by the Selwyns plus Adolph Klauber, is choppy--uncertain, coy and hard to please.

Miss Cowl's clear diction gives blank verse a delightful mellowness. Her comedy sense is sure; when Antony is summoned to duty in Rome, she be- comes a great tease. In her poignant farewell to her dying lover, and in her own majestic death scene, she is a queen who is every inch a woman. But her characterization is not so great as in Romeo and Juliet, lacking the pulsating push of pure romance.

She fails to bring out definitely whether Cleopatra is a woman torn be- tween love and statecraft, or whether she is just a fickle puss. In the moment when she seems about to betray her paramour to his conquering brother-in-law, Octavius, and Antony denounces her, it is uncertain whether he is not wronging a good, honest woman. The whole production shuffles with misplaced emphasis. Miss Cowl is developing a few mannerisms, the perquisites of a star.

As the Roman conqueror who forsook his wife and turned aside from triumphant destiny, Rollo Peters tries too hard to be her man. He is a trifle immature, despite sandal soles of a Chinese thickness to give him height and a padded cloak to give him breadth. He also wears a striking beard that might have been borrowed from a Roman , statue. Every hair in it radiates like the spokes of a wire wheel. For all his clever make-up he is a college orator declaiming. Every time violent thoughts burst from him he turns, spreads his legs and delivers himself straight at the footlights. The mighty voice of Rome, fulminating against treachery, has become a complaint to the management. In his dying moments --the poetic opportunity of the role-- the voice is a catarrhal croak.

Peters' designs for costumes and settings indicate that the production is primarily an intermission in Miss Cowl's repertoire. Except for one or two solid scenes, the settings consist of draperies and imagination. Large armies are represented by a few tufted helmets. It is Shakespeare without the spears.

Percy Hammond: "Miss Cowl's acting of Cleopatra is a musical counter- feit of passion and luxury. . . . Mr. Peters resembled a precocious boy disguising himself with long strides and false whiskers."

John Corbin: "The production, designed by Rollo Peters, is heavy with- out being particularly impressive, being small compensation for the very considerable entr'acte pauses." ! Heywood Broun: "Jane Cowl is a pretty Columbine and Rollo Peters a becomingly grave Pierrot. But we did not feel particularly sorry for either of them."

Alexander Woollcott: "We can imagine his [Peters'] elders in the audience feeling impelled to say: 'Well, son, you've played Anthony very nicely, but now you. must take those whiskers off and trot up stairs, for it's long past your bed time.'"

The Best Plays

These are the plays which, in the light of metropolitan criticism, seem most important: