New Plays

Spellbound, on special matinees, expounds the curse of cursing drink. It holds up the horrible example of a mother so intent upon defeating Demon Rum that she flushes her two little sons with anti-whiskey solutions. The result: one becomes a mute, the other a paralytic. Later in life, a thunderstorm suddenly starts up during the third act to provide atmosphere while the mute is engaged in raping a girl. This reprehensible sight so enrages the paralytic (20 years bedridden) that he suddenly renews his synaptic connections, skips out of bed, does successful battle for the Right. The play's existence testifies to at least one of the evils of Prohibition.

Stigma. Last year when they both acted in The Makropoulos Secret, Donald Duff was inspired to write a play for Joanna Roos. He called it Stigma, produced it himself, acts in it and helps direct. Miss Roos also appears. The youthful hero, a Rhodes scholar, declares all colors and conditions of women are equal in his sight, proves his preaching by practicing it upon a professor's wife and her Negro maid. The maid begets a child, the wife goes crazy, the theory goes wrong. With such material, a play must achieve sublimity or absurdity. The professor's wife amazed everybody near the end by affirming herself a gold lily.