New Plays

The Fountain. Eugene O'Neill is generally pointed at with pride as the foremost dramatist in America. He works with color, feeling, fear, with realism and occasionally with bitterness. He has an uncanny gift of breathing life into his pen puppets. He is certainly a genius.

Accordingly when Mr. O'Neill turned for the first time in his life to romance, many people trooped wide-eyed to the little Greenwich Village Theatre. It had long been known that this play of his was based on the magnificent theme of Ponce de Leon and his search for eternal youth. Many people went away a trifle disappointed. The Fountain is a beautiful poem and often a tiresome play.

Robert Edmond Jones, who bows only to Norman-Bel Geddes as a native creator of stage pictures, did the settings. There were many of them and they were of surpassing beauty. There were many moments in the play when the audience sat spellbound by the magnificence of the writing. The acting of Walter Huston in the principal role was admirable.

The Cocoanuts. No musical show this season, with the possible exceptions of the extravagant Sunny and the cherished Chariot's Revue, has excited more blissful anticipation than this return of the Marx Brothers. These four ingenious gentlemen first sprang into magnificent prominence two years ago with a noisy, nondescript and stunningly hilarious adventure called I'll Say She Is. Whereupon Irving Berlin gathered them unto himself and agreed to write music for their next show; George S. Kaufman (Merton; Beggar on Horseback; The Butter and Egg Man) was summoned to write the book; and producer Sam H. Harris released $100,000 or so into circulation to pay for costumes, settings, subordinates. From this fertile pasture The Cocoanuts grew.

Mr. Kaufman conceived the idea that things in Florida had gone far enough. They must be kidded. Therefore he put his plot out in the sunshine and set the Marxes to splashing around in it. Hotels, real estate and climate are treated with extreme irreverence. Somewhere in the first act there is a diamond robbery and somewhere in the second a minstrel show. The amazing Marxes contribute scene after scene of rattle-brained revelry. Groucho (with the cigar) and Harpo (he says nothing) are the principal disturbances. Mr. Berlin has contributed two excellent tunes, "A Little Bungalow" and "Florida," and Mr. Harris brilliant masses of costume and scenery. And the result of all this is that for some little time you will probably encounter considerable difficulty in buying tickets.

The School for Scandal. The all-star touring company presenting Sheridan's play stopped off in Manhattan for a one-night stand and invited an imposing list of notables to witness its magnificence. In the lower boxes were Ethel Barrymore, Walter Hampden, Mrs. Samuel Insull (now playing Lady Teazle elsewhere), Laurette Taylor. All this was rather gorgeous but detracted somewhat from the events on the stage. The events were somewhat at fault themselves and the evening was not conspicuously satisfactory.

This particular School for Scandal was directed by Basil Dean, an Englishman of considerable standing in his own community. On this side his reputation as director is rather ragged. In fact many of the critics consider his work inferior. He seems to put a pompous and theatrical feeling into the proceedings; at any rate, he did in this production. The wit of the infallible comedy shone through but dimly.

The company has departed for other cities and will continue presumably through the season. May Collins, a young and exceedingly lovely lady, plays Lady Teazle to good effect. O. P. Heggie, Henrietta Crosman and Julia Hoyt are a few of those in her train. They will doubtless prosper.

Easy Virtue. Noel Coward's third* play this season met with the coolest response of any of his works here presented. Only the inventive and glowing performance of Jane Cowl saved the situation.

It was noted by several of the professional spectators that every English playwright has one plot in his system that he must unloose before he is happy. This is the story of the somewhat battered woman who marries into complete respectability and utter boredom (Tanqueray). Mr. Coward has now written it fairly well.

An exceptionally gifted cast to support the exceptionally gifted Miss Cowl was assembled by the Frohman Co. Mabel Terry Lewis and Halliwell Hobbes--both from England--stood out pleasantly. Mr. Coward's invention and conversation for the first two acts were agile and entertaining. Toward the end he fumbled. The direction was in the hands of Basil Dean, an opinion of whose abilities is submitted elsewhere on this page.

Oh, Oh, Nurse. Musical comedy of the middle grade is difficult to discuss. It is never stimulating and never wholly dull. Usually a musical comedy of this type has two or three outstanding events. In the present opus these were: the clowning of May Boley and Don Barclay, a tune or two.

Gypsy Fires. If you sat down with a pair of scissors you could probably cut this concoction up into very small pieces and conclude that not one of them meant anything at all. Fitted together as they are, they form a fairly fervent melodrama and give Lillian Foster a chance for a lot of acting.

Miss Foster plays a gypsy miss who falls in love with a young man in a clean shirt and plus fours. Her hook-nosed grandmother fulminates gutterally against her marrying an effete outsider, and his parents kick and scream at the conception of a lady tramp entering their highly starched family. Matters are further mangled by a gypsy lover, who hopes to solve the situation by poking a knife through the breast pocket of the intruding clean shirt.

Cousin Sonia. Marguerita Sylva has done a variety of things behind the footlights. She is probably best known for her intermittent activities with various opera companies, including the Metropolitan. She turns to straight acting every now and then. She happens to have turned to it now in a conventional farce from France, in which there are husbands and lovers, politeness and indiscretion, wit and a song or two for Mme. Sylva. She plays a bustling relative who hurtles in and carries off the lover for herself. All mildly amusing.

* The others: Hay Fever and The Vortex.