New Plays

Rio Rita. Who would be likely to open a Manhattan theatre of dreamy elliptical architecture, hung with gorgeous tapestries, rich with color? Florenz Ziegfeld. In it he presented no Follies last week, but a musical comedy with fresh, feathery ballet dancers and a chorus that made strong men sigh. Rio Rita had a plot--something to do with oil leases and statesmen. A plot however, is mere parsley when the eyes and ears are well feasted. Pinwheel. Expressionism went on a debauch at the Neighborhood Playhouse (Manhattan) last week. Coney Island calliopes tooted, factory whistles shrieked, elevated trains jangled, klaxons yowled, saxophones clucked and gurgled during 16 scenes. A "Jane" (stenographer) is seduced by a "Guy," is married by a "Bookkeeper," is kept by a "Sugar Daddy." She shoots a taxicab driver and misbehaves generally. That is the way Author Francis Edwards Faragoh, Hungarian by birth, sees Greater New York. His Pinwheel sputters, squawks, dies like a skyrocket that never left the ground.

Trelawny of the Wells. Producer George C. Tyler said, "Where would the world be if it weren't for sentiment?"; and answered his own question by reviving Sir Arthur Wing Pinero's play with the the stage-folk of yesterday: John Drew, Mrs. Whiffen, Otto Kruger, Effie Shannon, Henrietta Crosman, Wilton Lackaye, O. P. Heggie. He tossed in a few of the younger luminaries, too: Pauline Lord,

Helen Gahagan, Hollo Peters, Eric Dressier, Mrs. Whiffen's matronly daughter, Peggy. This, the highest paid assemblage ever seen on one legitimate stage, enacts for the fourth time in the U. S. (the first, 1898) the fortunes of those shockingly Bohemian actors and actresses who strutted in famed Sadler's "Wells" during the reign of good Queen Victoria. To the zip-gobbling audiences of this day, the play offers mellow humor and pathos--qualities whose commercial values are doubtful. To the student of the theatre, to the lover of stage personalities, it is irresistable. Dramatist Pinero in Trelawny has created a young playwright--one whose theories and struggles against the theatrical traditions of the time were those of Sir Arthur himself. Young Tom Wrench abhors the long, pompous speeches; his characters speak like human beings. Scornfully, the old actors reject his manuscript: "Why, sir, there isn't a speech in it . . . nothing a man can really get his teeth into." Tom finally gets a backer for his play, none other than the superbly proper, anti-theatrical Vice Chancellor, whose frolicking son marries the leading lady of the "Wells", Miss Trelawny. This is one of Dramatist Pinero's early plays, yet it does not have the mutton-chop sleeves of his later pity-poor-Paula scenes.

The tragedy of actors (and playwrights too) is the fickleness of the populace. Today's idol may be tomorrow's rubbish. In Trelawny the downfall of the old timers is the essential motif. But in the revival the audience showed that it had not forgotten its old favorites. John Drew (Vice Chancellor), now 73, was cheered mightily when he first looked from behind his newspaper in the second act. Mrs. Whiffen, 83, a nice old lady, was greeted with prolonged applause. The world still loves its illusions.

These old actors, like the characters they portray in the play, are, at heart, children. Mrs. Whiffen stormed into Mr. Tyler's office to demand that her picture in the lobby of the New Amsterdam Theatre be torn down immediately.... "It made her look extremely unattractive and much too old." Henrietta Crosman appeared in the last scene in a gorgeous, red cloak when her part called for an old, dark-hued one . . . "She would not be seen in such an ugly costume." Where, indeed, would the world be, if it were not for sentiment? Certainly, it would have no theatre. If the Trelawny sentiment is a bit oldfashioned, it may serve to remind those who care to think about it that even pur ancestors loved to project their daydreams. And here are their favorite puppets. The Road to Rome:* Along with George Bernard Shaw, John Erskine and other modern twisters of the tongues of ancients, must be listed Robert Emmet Sherwood, cinema critic and editor of Life. His first play takes Hannibal and 60,000 lusty Carthaginians through Spain, across the Pyrenees and the Alps, down to the gates of Rome, leaving an "epidemic of pregnancy" in their wake. Doughboys at the Somme used no better profane quips than did Hannibal's boys at the Po. Meanwhile, in Rome maidens and matrons tremble at the news of the approaching invaders. Not so Amytis (Jane Cowl), wife of Procrastinator Fabius Maximus. She rustles herself into Hannibal's camp to prove to him that the conquest of empire is nothing compared to the sublimity of the human equation. To clinch her argument she spends the night with him, as the curtain falls. With a smile of content she goes back to Fabius. Like a thorough gentleman, Hannibal turns from Rome and demolishes the unfortunate city of Capua. Miss Cowl wears fine clothes, is lovely (although kittenish). Philip Merivale is an able Hannibal. Manhattanites were well entertained. For Better or Worse. A young collegian plans to study in Europe, to devote his life and his pen to the uplifting of the working classes.

He pauses to seduce the orphaned servant girl in his mother's suburban home; is obliged to marry her. Their love nest is a madhouse. He reads Candide; she reads the cinema magazines. He plays snatches of Chopin; she plays The Livery Stable Blues (on the phonograph). He soliquizes long and adolescently on art suppressed; she chews gum. After a fit of fretfulness, he decides to patch up his married life and give up his career. That is all there is. As a play, it is all for the worse.

The director started by making it a comedy, allowed it to slip into farce, and all the while the earnest young playwright, Allen de Lano from the Middle West, had grim tragedy in mind.

The Wandering Jew. Matheson Lang is a British actor of fine, tall physique and resonant voice. He looks, talks like Walter Hampden, and favors religious plays. Last week, he was on the point of leaving Montreal with his production of The Wandering Jew, when Mr. Shubert, with expensive theatres unoccupied, invited him to Manhattan. Actor Lang came. He brought his huge spectacle play, with its verse, its many sets, its mystery drama. Manhattan ordinarily frets under such austere conditions in its theatres. But it listened reverently to this play, watched intently the fierce Matathias reclaim his soul while the dross is consumed through centuries of suffering. There are many "phases": a house in Jerusalem on the day of Crucifixion; a tournament pavilion in the Middle Ages; a home in Sicily; a Spanish Inquisition chamber. Through them, the familiar legend is woven into a drama of salvation. It manages to hang together better than most episodic plays. The poetry at time is inspired. Though often relapsing into the sermon form, it has its organ-tones, and they are enough to make the play worthy of serious attention. The Dark. The idea (Martin Brown's) is that people are afraid of reality just as children are afraid of the dark. In the play, a man (Louis Calhern) is blinded, horribly scarred, wears a black mask. His wife (Julia Hoyt) is repulsed by ugliness, can no longer love him. To escape without confessing her abnormal, ignoble revulsion, she feigns love for another. But her husband clutches her, makes her gaze upon his ugliness. With familiarity, the scar seems no longer revolting. She kisses it. The symbolism, manifestly, is superficial. Yet it might have made good drama, were it not so forced. An aversion for things not pretty could hardly inspire such terror as this woman feels, or, if it could, the play fails to convince the audience of the fact. It has moments of theatrical power, notably the second act curtain scene when the hero stumbles past his wife, apparently to suicide, and she shrinks from saving him. But the background for all this horror is a song-and-dance parlor and a coterie of light-hearted society sparklers, so that it seems by contrast even more unreal than it actually is.

* Subtitled by the New York Times: "Hannibal's Wild Oat"; by the New York World: "Good Gracious, Hannibal."