New Plays in Manhattan

The Fanatics are moved to voluble (though sometimes static) excitement, by the inadequacies of marriage. In their effort to derive a suitable substitute, three acts of energetic controversy are consumed. Then, with the intention of giving trial marriage a totally unnecessary trial, the stage lovers, who 20 years ago would have taken their bows to the accompaniment of a wedding march, prepare to practice in Rome what they have preached in London. The arch-fanatic is Richard Bird, three years ago imported from England to play The Babe in Havoc. Later he supplied a brilliant Poet MarChbanks in Shaw's Candida. The faintly Galsworthian throes of this London hit give him opportunity to squirm and ogle with an excess of youth every time he sits down in a chair. The most finished performance is supplied by Ann Andrews, brought surprisingly into the second act to give the younger female fanatics the benefit of her life story. Her beauty and the sure delicacy of her acting lend a brief element of perfection to a comedy hampered by fitful mediocrity.

. . .

Coquette. What seems reliably like the finest play of the season arrived last week aglow with a stunning performance by Helen Hayes. The play was variously compounded out of Smith College and the intensely theatrical background of the melodrama, Broadway. In the cast of Broadway there once appeared one Ann Preston Bridgers, Smith girl, potential playwright. Her manuscript came under the canny eye of George Abbott, one of the authors of Broadway, and when he was through with it Jed Harris, producer of the same success, went out and hired a troupe. To head it he hired Helen Hayes, and by her playing she joined immediately the tiny group of actresses who make the theatre a land of wonder, tears & pure delight. Ably seconding her acts is Elliot Cabot, Harvard graduate, who has, in the past, often been cast unprepos-sessingly as a frothy ne'er-do-well. Herein he plays a rough villager with whom the fickle lady of the play falls surpassingly in love. Her southern family storm; and her father shoots the villager. For the gay, lying lady, suddenly swept off her feet by the truth of passion, there is no resource but death.

Nightstick. Again the underworld wars with the police; and again the police get both their man and the girl. In a misguided moment this young woman marries a killer, who kills enough people to give Detective Thomas Glennon reason to undertake his extermination. The fact that Mr. Glennon also loves the lady adds impetus. Out of all this grows another of the violent melodramas with which every theatrical season teems. But there is the favorable novelty that Nightstick is vividly acted, shamelessly incredible, and eminently exciting from the disordered, menacing beginning to the inevitably honeyed end.

One Shot Fired. Murder, and more of it, is almost a keynote of the season's plays. This one is tangled up with the free life of Greenwich Village. It is one of the least engrossing of current butcheries.

The Stairs. A melancholy play by Rosso di San Secondo, Italian dramatist, does not impress. Reared on the rueful abstraction that revenge reaps no pleasure for the revenger, it seems lifeless. The stairs of the title ramble upward through a tenement house. The gossip and the touseled details of life finally converge in the room where lives a woman. No prostitute, she turns out to be the deserted wife of the cruel landlord. The cast is adequate.

And So to Bed was a phrase often penned by Samuel Pepys, who will live in the genial preservative of a diary he kept in the 17th Century as long as there is English literature. Mr. Pepys was not, in the Victorian interpretation, a strictly moral man, and it is from his amatory propensities that much of this graceful comedy is spun. He visits a lady's lodging with the worst motives in the world; is interrupted by the arrival of His Gracious Majesty Charles II who has practically the same motives; is further embarrassed by the entrance of irate Mrs. Pepys. Wallace Eddinger plays the part in a manner agreeable but somewhat anachronistic. The rest of the cast, with minor exceptions, is the same that played successfully in London, including Yvonne Arnaud, excellent as the wife. Pepys is pronounced in the play as it was by the diarist himself, "Peeps".