New Plays

The Ghost Train. The first mystery melodrama of the year is an importation from England, and, though the locale is changed to Maine, it remains as completely British as ever. The story is of a group of stranded passengers at a country station who are terrified by tales of a mysterious train--an eerie local, Alexander Woollcott called it--that made its unearthly appearance from time to time. The mystery itself is intriguing enough, but the solution is less satisfying. On the whole, the melodrama is rather less exciting than it should be.

Henry--Behave. Lawrence Langner, a director of the Theatre Guild, and, therefore, supposedly a gentleman of taste, has just issued his mild endorsement of the cake-eater. Henry Wilton, pompous, ultra-puritanical pillar of the community suffers an attack of amnesia. With all inhibitions medically banished into oblivion, he proceeds to bedazzle himself in loud golf clothes, flirt with boarding house girls, reel off on a drunken spree, precipitate a brawl in the country club, and in other ways prove himself at heart a real, human personality. As a result of this exhibition, he finds himself, on recovery, a nominee for Congress. Evidently, Congress is Mr. Wilton's idea of the ne plus ultra, for he decides to live forever after in accordance with that personality which was discovered in him through amnesia. The irony is unconscious; the play dull. Reports have it that Mr. Langner has written a better play, to be produced later in the season.

Earl Carroll's Vanities. The fifth and grossest of all edition of Earl Carroll's Vanities, in spite of an irrelevant dash of Spanish atmosphere, presents the most authentic (but not at all unusual) impression of a medical student's nightmare. Bodies! Bodies! Bodies! Stuck all over the stage. Hung in midair, on dangling hooks. Rigid--as the law requires. Slowly they are wheeled in circles, yanked up, let down, by fiendish, invisible agencies. Occasionally they spring into action, appear as living, writhing creatures. Into this horror have strayed a few bits of freshness-Magda de Bries in a rattling dance, Moran and Mack, funny in spite of stale skits, Julius Tannen, dialogue comedian, and best of all, Julius Tannen's trained seal, who misbehaved beautifully. This is hardly enough light to brighten a whole freight-car load of carnality. Seats must be purchased at least a week in advance.

The Home Towners. Mr. George M. Cohan contrasts the comparative virtues of South Bend and New York much to the advantage of the latter in his new comedy. A native of the Indiana town who has made a fortune in New York invites his boyhood friend to the city to be best man at his marriage to a Manhattan girl. But the small towner, known as "Pig Head" Ban croft, is suspicious of all folks from the city and he manages to disrupt the romance temporarily before he is convinced that virtue is not lost to New Yorkers. About this scenario Mr. Cohan has writ ten a comedy of much comic effectiveness, if of no especial dramatic merit. Robert McWade plays the South Bend grouch skillfully.