"Hatrack," "Revelry"

If one were to choose the two most sensational bits of prose published in 1926, one might well select the short story "Hatrack" (reviewed in TIME, April 19), and the novel Revelry (TIME, Nov. 29). "Hatrack," the tale of "Fanny Fewclothes," rebuffed churchgoer and sought-after prostitute of Farmington,* Mo., enabled Editor H. L. Mencken to guffaw at the New England Watch and Ward Society, to boost the circulation of the American Mercury, to have the "Hatrack" issue barred from the U. S. mails. Revelry, a flashy novel of the scandals of the Harding Administration, is bringing fortune if not fame to Writer Samuel Hopkins Adams.

A young woman named Maurine Watkins knew all these things, knew what Broadway theatregoers gobble up, bestirred herself to dramatize "Hatrack" and Revelry. Last week it was announced that Sam H. Harris will probably produce the two plays in Manhattan in the late spring.

Miss Watkins, having gleaned craftsmanship wisdom from George Pierce Baker's drama school at Yale, wrote the robust satire, Chicago (TIME, Jan. 10). More recently, Miss Watkins has been writing of the doings of the Brownings for the New York World.

New Plays

Saturday's Children. If a white plume can be found for today's drama it waves upon the vizors of the "debunking" playwrights. In the first squad of their foremost legion marches Maxwell Anderson. He collaborated with Laurence Stallings to write What Price Glory? in which War's bravura of blah is ground into the mud.

Alone he created Saturday's Children, a drama of marriage between young things who must earn their living. Act I: heroine gets man by an old-time formula. Act II: romance wilts before love is done. Gas bills, grocers, butchers, goad the lovers into separation and sorrowing. Act III: comes reconciliation when the hero steals into his wife's bedroom for the same good reason that inspired young Porphyro to see Magdeline on the Eve of St. Agnes.

The whole indicts marriage on a charge of economical absurdity parading under an alias of natural necessity. For all its whirring the play grinds no ax in the presence of the audience. It succeeds because it stages the battle of Rent v. Romance as essential drama. It is the best U. S. comedy of the season. Rejected by several producers, it is brilliantly directed by Guthrie McClintic in his first venture with the Actors' Theatre. The cast is uniformly excellent.

Praying Curve. A certain track runs along such a treacherous precipice in the Rocky Mountains that, every time the train crawls along that stretch, passengers, trainmen and engineers utter what prayers are in them. The watchman of this section is a romantically minded youth who writes letters to a young lady under another man's name. One day the young lady ascends the Rockies to visit her correspondent and supposed lover. She is so chagrined at finding the wrong man that the hero has to save the train from being wrecked before the ending can become happy. On the whole, it might better have tumbled over the great declivity at the end of Act. I.

The Cradle Song. This play, translated from the Spanish of Gregorio and Ma ie Martinez Sierra by John Garrett Underbill, is the last and foremost of the 14th Street repertory. It is a tender melody of women, who, having taken the veil, strive with wistful severity, to abjure the world's dancing sunbeams for the grey routine of a Dominican convent. They adopt a baby girl. As the foundling sings from the cradle to womanhood, the nuns feel themselves, by her presence, just a little nearer to the throbbing joys of their dreaming. One day, the girl marries a young man and goes away. There is very little plot, even less action. But the play catches the very essence of sorrow--the passing of years, the frustration of desire, the ignorance of a paradise of Nirvana. For such a delicate symphony, the gentleness of Beatrice Terry as Prioress and the raspiness of Ruth Wilton as the disciplinary Sister Sagrario seem too strongly accented. Yet the production, as a whole, leaves an impression as beautiful as a faint winter sunset--and as heartbreaking.

"Yours Truly." Gene Buck, after years and years under Ziegfeld, has stepped into the limelight of production with his own show, including Leon Errol and charging $25 admission for the first night. Actor Errol is famed in the theatrical profession for the way his legs wobble when he is supposed to be drunk. His present vehicle, a gargantuan jumble full of ridiculously costumed regiments of chorines, also wobbles. The distinction, of course, is that Mr. Errol's precarious underpinning is comical, whereas the production's is not. The hero (not Actor Errol) is head of the narcotic squad.

Honor Be Damned. Again, Willard Mack. In this, his fourth play of the season, (The Noose, success, Lily Sue, not a success, Hangman's House, flop) he enacts the leading role himself. He is a smooth-tongued criminal lawyer, who could convince any jury of twelve men that "even if his client did steal the Brooklyn Bridge, the city didn't need the thing, anyhow." Among his achievements is securing the acquittal of a political friend charged with being the father of an illegitimate child. The able lawyer's "women folks" object to his consorting with politically influential bums, whereupon he beseeches them "not to go over that ground again. Business is business." But in the last act, his own cherished sister is in trouble, and on account of one of these very same friends. So Lawyer Connell learns his lesson, makes a good resolution just before he goes out on his last questionable trial in behalf of his sister's betrayer. Everybody has a heart of gold. The Willard Mack type of melodrama always has a popular sentiment at the bottom, coated over with reliable gags like a little "inside stuff" on the ways of men of the world. Sometimes the hokum is worked into effective theatricality, when the play "gets across with a bang." Honor Be Damned seemed to "get across" at the first night. Playwright Mack made a speech: "Because I have so many plays running this season, people think I write them over night. Ladies and gentlemen, it takes me a long time to write a play. This one, for instance, was written last year."

*Not to be confused with Farmington, Conn.