New Plays

The Constant Nymph. Playwright Basil Dean had the help of Margaret Kennedy herself in adapting her remarkable novel but the play came out as an episode, never a legend. The footlights, scenery, players and theatre talk, excellent though they are, bury temperaments in personalities. Irony becomes friction. The one character reproduced adequately is old Sanger, who never comes on stage.

As in the book, his presence broods over the opening scene. A vast, shaggy, Rabelaisian music master, he has fled England and wandered through Europe accumulating wives, mistresses, children, disciples, renown. He has at last brought them all, "Sanger's Circus," to a sprawling chalet in the Austrian Tyrol. There, shut away with his boar hound, he is dying. His nubile daughters live in an abandon of cultured savagery, vivid but slatternly mixtures of profundity and ignorance.

A young composer, Lewis Dodd, lean and sharp as a falcon, is on hand when Florence Churchill, efficient dilettante, comes to drag her cousins off to school in England. Anticipating an interesting seduction, Dodd soon finds himself a successful, well-kept celebrity in England, married to Florence. Not till then does he wake up to Tessa Sanger. Beneath her timely scorn, fearless innocence and sharp wit, her primitive, leaky little heart has been constantly his. All her intensity goes into her acquired conception of honor when he proposes that they run away. She refuses. But Florence cracks under the strain, scouring the slate with curses. Tessa goes with Dodd to a flyblown Brussels hostelry, where her weak heart-valve gives way as she struggles to open a window. She is free; the others live on.

To omit further unfair comparison of mediums, the play is powerful on its own plane. Of a moving generality it makes a convincing particular. Actor Glenn Anders as Dodd does not come up to London's frenzied descriptions of Noel Coward in that part, but Edna Best's Tessa in London could not have far surpassed the performance of Beatrix Thomson, quaint, perhaps too pretty, but subtly pigeontoed. It is said that all Broadway was combed to find an ingenue who knew what a constant nymph was, without success. Miss Thomson, daughter of a British army colonel, is the wife of Actor Claude Rains, who plays Roberto the hired man.

The Pirates of Penzance. It is not sacrilege to speak of this as a Gilbert, Sullivan and Ames operetta. The Faithful who have attended all the Savoyard productions since the beginning, relate that always the chorus and principals behaved with a stolid propriety that left vivacity entirely to the impish lines and nimble melodies--until Winthrop Ames took hold. He stages Gilbert and Sullivan in the spirit of its verses and music. His characters skip, bounce, flit, dance. They put the show in motion, bring it to life. It is no longer the sly satire of Gilbert peeking through a tricky melody from behind grave actors. The Ames people are as ridiculous, as blastingly satirical as the lines and music themselves. Hence, The Pirates of Penzance achieves success equal to that of lolanthe.

The story: how duty constrains a dutiful young man to continue, against his inclination, in the pirate business; how he wins one of the many pretty daughters of Britain's noble Major General while on duty. The company is the good old lolanthe crowd with the welcome addition of Ruth Thomas, a pretty, sweet-voiced coloratura soprano. Hands clap for John Barclay, pirate chief with rich voice and racy, long legs.

Comedie Franc,aise. Mme. Cecile Sorel, 150 trunks full of clothing, a supporting Comedie Franc,aise Company, filed into the Cosmopolitan to present a month of French repertory to U. S. audiences. Her program consists of: Du Barry, La Dame Aux Camelias, Le Misanthrope, Le Demi-Monde, Maitresse de Roi. Strong-featured, pronouncedly feminine in build, hailed as worthy successor to the "Divine Sarah" Bernhardt, she is no disappointment. The company is notable for its harmonious integration. Its best members subordinate themselves entirely to their parts, sometimes very small ones. The Comedie Franc,aise is a nationally endowed institution for cultivating and educating the artistic taste and appreciation of the French people. The U. S. has no nationally endowed theatre, though some of the Western cities have experimented successfully with municipal theatres.

Slaves All. John Rigordan (Lionel Atwill) is a genius, as is evidenced in this play by his inability to earn a living or keep sober. A genius should lead a sheltered life. But Sister Julia, upright Victorian and bane of his life, refuses to allow him to appropriate his share of the family funds over which she has been appointed trustee. Nor will she consent to his marrying the servant girl, Jenny. Ugly thoughts of murder assail John's soul. He fights them off. Providentially Sister Julia takes three laudanum tablets instead of one, thus relieving her brother of herself and murder. Then everybody finds freedom, salvation, happiness. But the genius does not marry the servant girl because she turns out to be his niece.

Seldom does such an amateurishly written play linger on Broadway. In construction, dialogue, climax, it is embarrassingly feeble. Playwright Edward Percy (England) prefaced his program with a charming dedication to his dog, Jock, who "while the play was being written, in the hot summer of 1921, was content to sit. . .beside his master, silent and motionless, except for two wistful eyes, an eager tail, and the occasional small tremolo of a whine."

This Woman Business. A group of grumpies congregate in the country home of Hodges, there to fortify their hatred of women. Just as they are orating on the feminine villainies, about which there is too much to be said, a girl thief (Genevieve Tobin) is dragged onto the scene by a law-abiding butler. Gallant if not susceptible, the grumpies decide to keep her out of jail and in the country home. Soon she becomes all things to all of them, a sister to young Honey, a mother to Brown, a siren to Hodges. Utterly unscrupulous in method, she reconciles the lot of them to her sex, confirming beyond cavil its immunity from masculine honor. One hears Barriesque echoes, welcome echoes, ring out sweetly in intelligent dialogue. In a cast including Genevieve Tobin and O. P. Heggie, honors go to Edward Rigby, as the man who needs woman. Benn W. Levy, young Oxonian, wrote the play.