New Plays

The Chief Thing. The penchant of the Theatre Guild for digging up stray sensations from the Continent continues. This play has been given in most foreign centres and arose in Russia. It is by one Nicholas Evreinov, and he was lured hither by the Guild, among other people, to stage his own play.

It seems doubtful whether The Chief Thing will be a sensation here. It is strange and too mixed up for the populace. Perhaps it is too resolutely cheerful for the great minds, which are not used to cheerful things from Russia any more than Russia itself is used to them.

Life is entirely theatrical and illusory, argues the playwright. He brings to earth the apocalyptic Paraclete, incarnated as a U. S. producer whose stage is the world. This curious person, whose good works have already led him to commit trigamy, engages a band of actors to enter a dismal lodging house and play roles necessary to the happiness of the various inmates. At the end, instead of resolving his ingenious complications, Evreinov tosses the play in the air for the audience to finish as it likes and the actors leap across the footlights into "real life." A good Guild cast is supplemented by McKay Morris and Estelle Winwood.

What's The Big Idea? Connoisseurs of brilliance in line and performance will remember The Boomerang. Martha Hedman was a major item in the brilliance of performance. She has since retired and makes her reappearance as a playwright. She has collaborated with her husband, Henry A. House, on this comedy. It is about a helter-skelter household of three old musicians and a young one. The old musicians did not like the girl that suddenly appeared among them, and the young one did. The old ones changed their minds by the last act. Both play and peformance were of only mild excellence.

Schweiger. Franz Werfel has recently become the most fought over playwright. Either you liked Goat Song or you did not and either way you were willing to commit mayhem to support your view. That first play of his to be given here has now gone its way and been replaced by a more penetrating because more personal tragedy. Unfortunately it is not the canny theatrical stimulant that the first play was. You can believe it more thoroughly but you will not be so excited. The word "airless" has been applied and best fits the entertainment.

Jacob Ben-Ami plays a man whose murder of a child haunts him through life. There is a grotesque and fearsome figure of a healer who shrives the poor unhappy man but cannot kill the spectre. The third personality is the man's wife. The great shock of the play is when she kills the man's and her own child by abortion.

The wife is played by Ann Harding, the excessively blond young woman who 'has been spending most of her season in Stolen Fruit by the Italian, Dario Nicodemi. Miss Harding is becoming a better and better actress. Mr. Ben-Ami is, of course, one of the most magnificently accomplished performers of our theatre. It is unpleasant to ponder how difficult an evening Schweiger would have been without these two.