New Plays

Ostriches. A play by Edward Wilbraham about a daughter who falls in love with her mother's amorous attache might possibly be of decided interest. Ostriches is never decided and seldom of interest. It ends on a dead note with which the girl gives up her man and gives in to her mother.

There was a good deal of excitement over the reappearance of Amelia Bingham after an extended absence from our footlights. Her part was "fattened" for her special type of playing and well done. Janet Beecher was occupied in her normal, manner with the part of the mother while Katherine Alexander took the general honors as the daughter. Miss Alexander is a tall, handsome miss who has made her most enviable impressions as the various daughters who are this recalcitrant younger generation.

Alexander Woollcot -"A magnificent performance by the best troupe imaginable would not make Ostriches a play worth going to see."

Stark Young -"One of those familiar slices of French life, in this case spread with American butter."

Bringing Up Father. For ten years, various travesties and musical digressions on the family of Mr. George McManus' comic strip have been trouping through the one-night stands. One of them has suddenly, and quite unaccountably, turned up in a Broadway theatre. Loud was the cynics' laughter. Manhattan will not endure for many nights a one- nightstand company dressed up in 42nd Street clothing. Both as to wit, music and performance the offering was generously condemned as the season's dead low.

Variety -"At $2.75 . . . petty larceny."

Love for Love. There was a good deal of chop-licking on the part of the more unregenerate critics when this ancient bit of brittle Congreve chatter was released on the stage of the Greenwich Village Theatre. It proved to be one of the most unrestrained of the so-called immoral contributions to the season. Heywood Broun, in particular, was pleased by the display. He argued that a dirty play was perfectly admissible provided it was funny enough. Almost everyone agreed that it was funny enough.

William Congreve lived in the merry days of Charles II, when the artistic world of London had just emerged from the frowning reticence of the Cromwell era and was bent upon enjoyment. It enjoyed itself, much as it still does, with inquiries into forbidden things. Congreve was at once the most facile and the most witty of the inquirers. His plays are frankly fragile conversations, bent chiefly upon satire of love, as it was then conveniently called. The Provincetown Playhouse group, which have several times more than justified their first season fanfare of intelligent plays produced for the intelligent, gave the piece a satisfactory display. Most of their usual players (Helen Freeman, Edgar Stehli, Walter Abel, E. J. Ballantine, Perry Ivins) were in the cast and accounted for themselves with even competence. Adrienne Morrison, a visitor, added a brilliant touch. It was the consensus of opinion that the piece was just well enough played to make you pine to see it with an all-star company.

Alexander Woollcott -"Bold, bright, bawdy comedy."

Stark Young -"The lustre of it, the health and deviltry . . . wit that runs and pours like wine."

The Dunce Boy. There was much anticipatory comment about this latest play by Lula Vollmer. She was the author of the glowing Sun-Up and the successful, if not so glowing Shame Woman. The locale of her plays is the Southern mountains, her people the mountaineers. Their dialect is liquid, their passions primitive. She came from that country to Man- hattan, got a job selling tickets for the Theatre Guild. Then Sun-Up. Quite contrary to the custom, it must be said that Miss Vollmer broke badly with The Dunce Boy.

It is a curious and tiresome ramble among the tangled mental paths of idiocy. Such wanderings must be comic or terrible. The Dunce Boy was, unfortunately, both.