Strange Party

IN SUCH A NIGHT--Babette Deutsch--John Day ($2). To perceive is genius; to ignore, divine. Miss Deutsch (Mrs. Avrahm Yarmolinsky), poetic genius, sorely lacks divinity. She would wring the last drop of significance from the smallest sensuous detail--a tube of tooth paste, the feel of blankets, a gold-sheathed bodice, phonograph music. For variety of detail she has chosen a situation that might perfectly well arise but would scarcely continue. At a heterogeneous party given by affluent, slightly quarrelsome young-marrieds, a woman who came only to please her husband begins, unexpectedly, to deliver her baby. The party goes on. The child is born despite every one's pretense that it is not being born. The tension creates climaxes, anti-climaxes, dilemmas--for Leonard Hogarth, a writer in love with the hostess; for the hostess, whose quarrels with her husband have insensibly bound her to him; for the host's vivid young sister, who is about to elope but refrains; for a maid, who vaguely feels the need of a baby of her own. The evening's dancing, whispering, birth-pains, laughter, drinking, soliloquizing, are followed through the consciousness of first one personality, then another, with much skillful characterization and direct effect. Everything results in compromise except the child's birth (girl), the continued self-sufficiency of the one real artist present (painter), and the sustained vein of the writing, which for sensitive if not always delicate realism will bear lofty comparisons. Miss Deutsch escapes classification with those persons whose obsession is finding God in a shoe-button or corset-string, by virtue of a self-restraint rare among expressionists.