New Plays

The Joker. A ponderous pair of deep red curtains and the personality of Ralph Morgan are the chief points of interest in this play. Through these red curtains the hero is forced to walk at the big moment--presumably to instant death. His bravery unhinges the villain and pretty soon it is time to go home.

To be unpleasantly accurate, it is time to go home much sooner. The Joker is a wordy and obvious melodrama. Mr. Morgan is far too good an actor to play this sort of thing, in which he is one jump ahead of the villain, poverty and cuckoldom.

Solid Ivory. The sporting appetite of the public is constantly being met with theatrical fodder. Is Zat So? deals with prizefighting, and The Poor Nut with a track meet. The fight and the quarter-mile run are exhibited on the stage. Both are successes. Solid Ivory turns to baseball, and borrows in the process something of the slang sorcery of Ring Lardner.

Mr. Lardner was not actually concerned in the writing of the play, yet the leading character resembles his celebrated Jack Keefe, the conceited, blatant young professional baseballer. If the resemblance had been accurate, Solid Ivory might have been a sensation. As it is, it is simply a fair slang comedy, glorifying the home-run.

Twelve Miles Out. Rum-running has featured so forcibly in our national life these last few years that it is only natural it should appear upon the stage. In this play the rumrunner is made a hero, a rough diamond rattling around in the greasy pocket of fate. He wins a lovely lady and confounds the competitors for his cargo, and there is much sea salt in evidence everywhere. One scene, with the schooner swaying in the swells, is amazingly accurate. Of the accuracy of the rest one may have doubts. Romance is seldom accurate. That is why people like to see it on the stage. Life turns the edges of romance too swiftly. Twelve Miles Out will probably serve until the holidays.

In a Garden. There is an ever growing impression that Laurette Taylor is the greatest U.S. actress. Devotees of Ethel Barrymore and Mrs. Fiske will balk indignantly at this assertion, for the impression has been current for some years that Mrs. Fiske is our greatest actress, and that Miss

Barrymore would probably be our greatest actress if she had had better plays in the last half dozen years.

Miss Taylor's latest production is a daring and penetrating effort by Philip J.Q. Barry, whose You and I was a Harvard Prize Play and a Manhattan success. He has undertaken to reveal the workings of a woman's heart; the heart of a wife whose playwright husband has made her a puppet in his mental workship. There is of course another man. Among these three a shadowy, elemental and amazingly penetrating triangle develops.

To many the play will be an adventure in the worried field of the inexplicable. Most minds will not understand and will therefore condemn it. Almost any fine forward-looking endeavor in the arts runs this maddening risk. For the rest the play will be a memorable experience.

Arthur Hopkins has the furnishings from the workshop of Robert Edmond Jones, and has cast Louis Calhern, Frank Conroy and Ferdinand Gottschalk in Miss Taylor's support. All are eminently suitable.

The Offense. An English importation was put on for special matinees with Dennis Neilson-Terry and Mary Glynne in the leads. They are the London players brought over for the exceedingly short lived The Crooked Friday. In the new play they appear to be better performers; it helps them a good deal by being pretty steadily interesting in itself.

Psychology, neuroses, fixations. complexes and all the rest hava become so firmly fixed in the dinner conversation of the land that the play will be easily understood. These peculiar phenomena are dealt with in words of one syllable. An event in the hero's youth bites deep into his consciousness, is discovered and the poison let off in the approved modern fashion at the last.