New Plays in Manhattan

The Would-Be Gentleman is an excessively poor translation of Moliere's title Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme; the rest of the modernized adaptation with which Eva Le Gallienne's Civic Repertory Theatre opened its season was not so strikingly bad but it somehow made the old farce act its age. Only the scene wherein M. Jourdain superintends ironic and Turkish nuptials is as funny as the arty members of the audience thought the rest to be.

L'Invitation au Voyage. Jean Jacques Bernard, who wrote the Civic Repertory's second opening qf the week, believes in suggestion rather than explanation as the most potent method of emphasizing subtle meanings. The heroine of his play is a complexed lady who, fatigued by her husband, forms a fixation for a businessman whom she had disregarded until he departed from France for the Argentine. During his absence, she worships him and lives at war with her neighbours; when he returns from South America, she is compelled, by comparing her mental image with reality, to curtail her adoration, and to live, more than ever, at war with life.

The action, the excitements of this play are entirely cerebral though not for that reason ineffective. They lead to no action on the stage but to telling wrinkles in the cool and capable forehead of Eva Le Gallienne, as the lady who is complexedly distressed.

When Crummies Played. This is the first of six plays, each to run four weeks, which will be produced by the Garrick Players during the season. This particular piece, first presented at the Lyric Theatre, Hammersmith, London, by Sir Nigel Playfair, concerns the presentation by Mr. Vincent Crummies' Players, of a play which portrayed the temptations and disaster of a young apprentice in the City. A nice, tweedy audience enjoyed the "satirical picture of the players, adapted from [an episode in] Charles Dickens's Nicholas Nickleby."

Straight Thru the Door. An actor-playwright (Actor-Playwright William Hodge) was building a house in the suburbs. His foreman was murdered. The actor-playwright had an admirer--feminine, of course--who was doing the interior decorating in the new house. The foreman had made nasty allusions to the actor-playwright's conduct with the architect, and the foreman's men had seen the interior decorator sinking a hot kiss in the actor-playwright's lips. It all looked bad for the actor-playwright, but there was a happy ending: the real murderer was led away to the electric chair. William Hodge not only wrote the play but played the lead. A welcome relief from him was William Culkn, in the role of the obtuse hawkshaw.

The Command Performance celebrates one of those witty romances which occur constantly even at this late era in Moldavia, a non-existent country. An actor rescues a lady, assailed by ruffians in the street. One of the ruffians is the decadent Prince of Moldavia; the actor is arrested and haled before the queen.

The prime minister of Moldavia is negotiating a treaty with the fat King of Wallachia; to contract the alliance is essential, but to do so it is also essential that the Prince of Moldavia marry the proud Princess of Wallachia. The true prince is unwilling to bother with preliminaries; hence the actor is offered his choice between a life-career in the salt mines and a chance to woo by proxy the foreign princess and bring her back for the real prince to wed. He chooses the latter and naturally falls in love with the lady he is supposed to deceive. It looks like tears for the finish until, on the day of the wedding, the real prince decides to abdicate and the actor, who looks just like him, goes to the altar with the lady and becomes a prince and her husband.

All this has been done a thousand times before; generally, however, with boots, spurs, duels, serious passions. The Command Performance is modern romance, feathery, sophisticated. The queen smokes cigarets; the King of Wallachia abuses his wife, as does Lord Trench in The High Road; the actor, played well by Ian Keith, kisses the queen's hand in farewell and then pats it with affection; the prince, played less well by Ian Keith, sets off for the U. S. to make his living, one suspects, in a night club.

Pleasure Man was a ridiculous and stupid play relating apparently the trite story of a backstage Don Juan; actually its purpose was to exploit, not study, homosexualism in its most blatant form. A party was given on the stage by one pervert for his fellows; here Mae West provided her actors with shrill obscenities to shriek. The audience, more prurient even than the playwright, found these interludes funny or exciting; they laughed with weird crescendoes.

No sooner was the first performance over than authorities, who, from reading the late Jack Conway's review in Variety, had gauged the substance of the play, appeared with their cohorts and dragged all the female impersonators and the few remaining members of the cast to a nearby jail. This, it was supposed, would end the silly business; but counsel for Mae West secured an injunction which allowed the performance to be given twice more before it was attacked again. The second arrests were more complete; even Author Mae West was indicted for disorderly conduct and the play did not reopen.

Billie. If there was any ambiguity of gender in the title of George Cohan's most recent American musical play it was removed when pretty Polly Walker, in a fetching fluster, confessed: "That's my name, Billie, and my daddy's was the same, Billie." Her confession was made on first meeting Jackson (in the previously popular non-musical version known as "Broadway") Jones. He had inherited money from his uncle and Billie was his uncle's secretary. For commendable reasons, Billie wished Jackson not to sell the avuncular corporation, a chewing gum one; she urged him to keep on with the business himself in defiance of protesting "trusts." And this he did.

With what wealth of plot and counterplot did the play proceed! A friend of Jackson Jones lent his incongruous assistance to Billie; he was a person who used these terms in answering a telephone: "You speak first, it's your nickel." Also he suggested a Smith slogan: "All for one and All for Al!"

It would be very difficult to say in what respect an American musical play is better than a musical play which is not American. Also it would be useless; Mr. Cohan and the formula have made each other famous and it will require more than death to part them. It is true that the indigenous qualities of Billie happen often to be its most appealing ones; there is a scene in which two idiotic rogues confer together, making monkeys of themselves and many others. Songs and dances are in Billie also; of the former not the least engaging is one which contains the sweet though unrevealing phrase, "Wherever we were, where were we?''

As Billie, Polly Walker is melodious and shiny, while Mr. Joseph Wagstaff never stops being an excited Jackson Jones. Altogether Billie is excellent entertainment, clean without being inane. It is to be regretted that, in his effort to slight none of the great U. S. ideals, George Cohan has promoted or permitted a measly interlude, a song of which the title and refrain are "Personality." Possession. Edgar Selwyn is not a playwright who takes his comedy too lightly. Indeed, in this play of gloomy wedlock and ill-starred infidelities, he preaches a sad sermon with his quips and makes Margaret Lawrence, who usually seems bearable if not entrancing, a monstrous brute of conjugal ferocities. When her bond-broking husband (Walter Connolly) blankets himself with another lady, the wife follows, gnashing threats of duty. All the forces of law and decency seem allied with the dreadful spouse; even the bond-broker's son helps persuade him to leave the love who does not nag and return to domesticity.

The best high comedy, perhaps, is achieved by characters who are not prone to think of duty until after they have remembered all the other essentials for life's picnic. Margaret Lawrence has played roles in which she was far more charming than she is now as Mrs. Anne Whiteman; but, having had the courage to be unattractive, she also has the skill to make herself a nagging monster. The most noteworthy events in the career of Margaret Lawrence have been her returns to the stage; one, in 1918, after several years of leisure; the other last year after a period of diverting the Antipodes.