New Plays

Sitting Pretty. A musical comedy by Guy Bolton, P. G. Wodehouse, Jerome Kern. Its chief concern is to rouse interest in a millionaire who has unwittingly adopted a young crook and who wants to marry him off to a hand-picked mate. The lyrics, smooth, adroit, prettily rhymed and easily audible, are its only saving grace. Queenie Smith, with her 48 inches of saucy gaminerie, is the biggest asset. She dances like a sunbeam, stopping the show, whenever she gets in motion. Her acute low comedy sense almost twists most of her lines into a laugh. Frank Mclntyre, aside from one genuinely funny song about Sing Sing, manages to carry a comedy role by sheer weight. The rest of the company are adequate. The settings and costumes are smart.

Two Strangers from Nowhere. They might as well return from the place whence they came. The author, Myron C. Fagan, seems to have turned Devil's advocate, for no reason at all. He summons Mephistopheles to earth, for the purpose of sending an erring wife back to her struggling husband, and of reproving characters whenever they speak unkindly of their Maker. At times the play sounds like Faust being run backwards. It is simply propaganda for the author's private views on practically everything. Fritz Lieber in the leading role is enamored of his interminable speeches. It is a case of the drooling passion.

Helena's Boys. Mrs. Fiske, eternally and fragrantly youthful in her own spirit, has gone to the side of those playwrights who devote three acts to putting the younger generation over their knee. One of the widow Helena's sons is a young shrub who is in danger of being plucked from preparatory school for loudly summarizing a patriotic address as "Bunk!" The other writes for a magazine ai which free love is the burning creed. The widow's prescription for curing them of the New Freedom is as follows:

Take a large drink of cider, brazenly paraded as whiskey, and mix with the constitution of a hitherto respectable widow.

When drunk, let her spout the very theories her children have been declaring.

When very drunk, let her calmly suggest living in illicit arrangement with a prosaic manufacturer who has been courting her with bovine persistence.

After swallowing this, the two sons are nauseated with their own medicine and quickly reform.

The audience gets sickish, too. While there is much genteel jocularity in Ida Lublenski Ehrlich's play, its point can be seen several blocks away. When attained, it hardly seems worth panting after. Mrs. Fiske is her usual sparkling, irridescent self.

Provincetown Theatre. Messrs. Eugene O'Neill (dramatist), Robert Edmond Jones (artist) and Kenneth Macgowan (author) have rounded out their best experimental bill to date and have established the place of their little theatre--doing things well that would not be done at all--anywhere else.

Mr. O'Neill has dramatized Coleridge's Ancient Mariner without making it any less a tribute to "dat old Davil sea." Following the simple process of eliminating a few lines from the poem, he does not add a single phrase of his own except in the stage directions which--with the help of some lights--transform the poem into a drama. Following these directions, the Mariner mouths his anguished story at the Wedding Guest he has stopped; while the ghosts of the crew that died for his misdeed act as a muffled, mummified chorus.

The only setting used in the production is a sketchy ship, the prow, stern and mast of which are quite naively carried on by the phantom sailors and slipped into place on the stage. Despite this transparency of presentation, a weirdly moving effect is achieved, even when a dead sailor puts his hand up to rock the mast in a storm.

The crew illustrate the Mariner's recital by grouping themselves on the ship in grotesquely contorted poses, looking uncannily like corpses stagnant in seaweed. Their edifyingly horrific effect is heightened by masks made by James Light in Benda's most blood-curdling manner. The masks, creepily memorable, have a greenish tinge, with dank hair plastered over them.

They provide a powerful setting for E. J. Ballantine, who speaks the lines of the Mariner with beauty, fine understanding and variety, giving a handsomely sustained performance that saves his part from becoming the monologue of a religious exhorter. Good lighting effects enhance the kaleidoscopic, episodic nature of the action in this novelty bereft of sex.

In the same evening George Dandin, Moliere's sophisticated trifle of the uncouth husband who was hoodwinked by his philandering, patrician wife, is revived prettily in a good English translation. But all its antic graces cannot hide the fact that it is a gilded potboiler. It is done in the mode of that simpering, formal period when Truth was nothing and an attitude everything.

Man and the Masses. Ernst Tellen, of the new Germany, wrote a play called Masse Mensch. German socialists who had seen their "Christs dying on the barricades" greeted the play with awful zeal. It became the talk of Central Europe. It was translated into English by Poet Untermeyer, produced by the Theatre Guild, and struck its American audience dumb and weary.

The play is vaguely about "The Husband Who Represents the State and the Woman Who Symbolizes the Social Revolution." There is also the Bourgeoisie.

The latter is, however, plainly characterized as "God-damned," and is subsequently committeed to the company of the Deity who is Himself somewhat similarly described.

In spite of Jacob Ben-Ami and Blanche Yurka, Man and the Masses is, to the American eye and ear, full of sound and fury, and otherwise naught.