New Plays

Sam Abramovitch is Anne Nichols' new production, with a cast of almost 100. It tells of a Russian Jew, whose ideal is uplift of humanity, whom poverty drives to amass a fortune in the U. S., who later loses both fortune and a beloved son, thereupon re-dedicates himself to his original, unmercenary ideal of uplifting humanity. Just how the elevation is to be accomplished is not divulged, but the End of Ends is when "all men love one another like brothers.

The ridiculousness of Abie's Irish Rose is forsaken for the sublimity of saintliness. Therefore, the lines are written in blank verse, a special musical accompaniment is provided to exalt them still higher. Unfortunately, the play, weighted down by heavy-handed craftsmanship and uninspired poetry, ascends to nothing loftier than pompous platitudinousness. Specimen of the verse: "a magnificent flood of mothers' milk." Sam Abramovitch might as logically have been Hans Schneidewind but for the local box office.

The Barker was written by Kenyon Nicholson, young Columbia University professor of dramatic art. Paradoxically, it falls short of technical efficiency the while it achieves a glorious fullness of unacademic atmosphere, characterization and emotional conflict. In the play, all the tent-show folk--hula dancer, snake-charmer, clown, odd-job men -- accept with varying humors their haphazard, futile nom-adism--all except the barker, "Nifty" Miller, soul and essence of the entire raucous flimflam. He, chained like the others to the aimless tent life, holds fast to the idea that his only son will one day be a wealthy, respectable lawyer in a stable community. But the ballyhoo beckons to the boy, also. He joins the circus one vacation, soon develops an aversion for "all them colleges" of his father's dreams and hopes, marries the snake-charmer, a maid of 20 summers, whose age "if ye go by experience is 120." Brokenhearted, disappointed by his son's "ingratitude," "Nifty" is on the point of deserting the show when he sees the substitute barker flopping about in a feeble exhortation before an unresponsive crowd. Then, like Captain Flagg and Sergeant Quirt of What Price Glory, "Nifty" rushes onto the platform to discharge a duty too near his heart to be abandoned even by galled ambition. Thereafter the ballyhoo goes on as before.

In the last act, neither son nor daughter-in-law, two central characters, appears on the stage. An irrelevant, unconvincing decision on the part of "Nifty's" woman (the hula dancer) to commit suicide is dragged in to give the play a last shove on its way to an unsatisfactory conclusion. Finally, a postal card arrives from Chicago, announcing that the erring son is working steadily in a law office and' the snake-charmer wife is dancing in a night club for their mutual support. The gods permit life to be as scattered as that, but not art. The last act absence of Lou of the Reptiles, serves, however, to emphasize the excellence of Claudette Colbert who enacts that role. Walter Huston ("Nifty") does nobly by the stern phases of the barker's character, but fails to discover in his part the essential exuberance of sham to which the lines point. For all that, the tense emotion, fascinating atmosphere, curious vernacular of the dialogue lend Playwright Nicholson's creation a sure magic.

Damn the Tears attempts to dramatize the musings of a man out of tune with the world. In college he fails to play baseball according to the rules governing other athletes. In life he finds the same maladjustment. Eleven scenes describe his mental odyssey, taking him through school, sanatorium, streetcorner, deserted room, and finally to salvation, which is achieved in a dream of celestial music and maidenhood. In staging the conjurings of this queer mind, the dramatist employs a queer technique peculiar to the individual out of whom the drama grows. The result is erotic expression of eroticism, or, more simply, insanity.

Where's Your Husband? Herein it happens that Husband has just stamped away from home in high dudgeon, as Aunt and Uncle from Gloucester drop in for a visit. The idea is to find a substitute husband, to prove that family life in the household is all it should be to deserve Uncle's promised $50,000 bequest. Instead of one substitute husband, the little wife happens to acquire two. What a rolling under and from under beds goes on thereafter! It is so extremely agitated, raucous, whirligigish, that the only recourse is to shut the eyes and plug the ears every few minutes for tragic relief. What is thereby missed matters not at all.

The Virgin Man is a "New Haven boy" whom three beauteous, unscrupulous women would seduce in their own homes. The smut is not clever enough.

Lady Alone. Since The Bride of the Lamb (TIME, Apr. 12) Alice Brady's role has been One Actress in Search of a Play. She tried Vincent Lawrence's Sour Grapes with scant success, The Witch with less and now Lady Alone with none at all. In her latest vehicle, she is a charmer who unwisely ravishes a married man. He, after tossing away his fortune to obtain a divorce from a wife five years absent from his hearth, goes to Africa to kill tigers. Because his freedom was won for the beasts of the jungle rather than for her companionship, Nina (Alice Brady) takes an overdose of sleeping potion, lies dead in the sight of the audience through three curtain calls. The play does not have the excuse of being written by a gay sophomore who had unexpectedly gone sublime with a glimpse of life's irony.