New Plays in Manhattan

Mr. Moneypenny. Perhaps it was the purpose of this play that, after seeing it, one should go out among the trees, drink buttermilk, nibble roots and herbs, renounce money as "the root of all evil" (a line in the play). This purpose was not accomplished. Author Channing Pollock, a great showman, is not a great artist. He has tried to do a Faust, with snatches of The Adding Machine and the Ballet Mechanique. His devil is a silk-hatted Babbitt named Mr. Moneypenny, who seizes an old and whining clerk named John Jones, gives him ticker tape and a Park Avenue apartment. It soon becomes apparent that John Jones is not happy--one doubts that he could be happy under any conditions. His children (with one exception) go to various types of metropolitan hell. Meanwhile, Author Pollock denounces night clubs, politicians, newspaper owners, Algonquinesque writers, Wall Street, society. It is all very bitter; but there is action, noise and color, settings by Robert Edmond Jones, staccato staging by Richard Boleslavsky. These first two acts are the outstanding curiosity of the current Manhattan season. The third act is a tedious sermon showing that happiness is just around the corner for those who renounce gold & greed. Author Pollock calls the whole thing a "verbal cartoon."

The Common Sin, variously known as Bobo's Bargain, Bad Debts and Paid Off, came out of the shop, stumbled through a quadrangle of illicit love, polished off a polite off-stage murder, ended sweetly. Its author, Willard Mack, also wrote the current and noisy Gang War.

The K Guy, so called because in his forgeries he always chose a name containing the letter K, ended up in Hollywood with a contract in the movies. Nobody seemed to know who he was and all through the play suspicion veered among the occupants of a Hollywood lunchroom. When suspicion was not veering, gags appeared; these were somewhat amusing and so was The K Guy.

Three Cheers. It is possible to be sane and to think that Will Rogers is not funny. There were moments in Three Cheers when he was being a little too much of a big brother to Dorothy Stone, for whose father, Fred, he had been persuaded to substitute; and there were other moments when he was too self-consciously ingenuous and stammering. Yet, as usual, his gags were good:

"Al Smith's bein' a Catholic ain't goin' to hurt him none. What's goin' to hurt him is his being a Democrat."

''If the Democrats had as much money as the Republicans, they would stop trying to elect a president, divide it up into shares, and celebrate."

Also there was a song which Will Rogers sang together with Andy Tombes. La-de-da was the refrain of the song and its name was the Lard Song; in the course of it, Andy Tombes interrupted his singing to ask Will Rogers whether he had heard about the Scotchman who went to the whippet races. "Yes," said Rogers, "and he bet on the hare."

Aside from Will Rogers, the best thing in Three Cheers is Patsy Kelly, who fixes her beady and inspired eyes upon a comedian and sings "You're Beautiful." in a scratchy voice. Dorothy Stone dances nicely, but without the partnership of her father her talent even in this direction seems less than bewildering; as yet she has too little ability to be a star.

Olympia. Laura Hope Crews' impersonation of a proud princess, perplexed with imminent scandals, reached one of its peaks in the second act. She had just been told that the officer with whom her daughter had been having a flirtation was really a crook called Myrovsky. The effect of this information the princess showed, less by twitchings of her face than by the expression of her knee, which trembled while she sat still in a chair.

Later on, it appeared that the agonies of the elderly princess were quite unnecessary. The soldier was no cardsharper but a clever commoner who had devised this means of punishing the young princess for being cruel to him--a means also of exhibiting the soothing power of wickedness upon recalcitrant women. In the last act it appears that the soldier has triumphed upon the lady who insulted him in the first. Though she pleads with him not to go away, he has become arrogant now and leaves her though he loves her.

With Laura Hope Crews in Olympia is famed Fay Compton, who has excited English enthusiasm since her 1911 debut in The Follies. Long ago, Fay Compton played the title role, which made Maude Adams famous here, in Peter Pan. Those actresses who are great in Barrie's plays, like those who excel in Shakespeare's, are a special type, often not successful elsewhere. Fay Compton is perhaps a Barrie actress but she has been cheered in many other sorts of plays. Since 1914, she has not played in the U. S.; then she was on her second husband, now she has her third. Her present U. S. appearance, while it pleased many, pleased, especially pleased, St. John Ervine, visiting London critic, who was reminded of his home town so happily that he wrote a glowing tribute to Fay Compton while he clawed Olympia and Author Molnar.

Olympia is a dinner-table anecdote about pre-War Austrian intrigue. Though flecked with Molnar's second-best jokes and informed with the proper politesse, Olympia would have been very dull without Actress Crews who smoked a cigar and sometimes made it sparkle while her daughter was being seduced.

The Cherry Orchard. Alia Nazimova, the most caricatured actress of her generation, returned, out of vaudeville and the cinemansions of the west, to the Civic Repertory Theatre in Eva LeGallienne's sensitive if not inspired production of Chekhov's last play, The Cherry Orchard. The Cherry Orchard is not especially adaptable to translation; its sly and sad description of improvident aristocracy, vaguely cheerful in the face of ruin, is a little forlorn in a strange tongue and a new country, as its people are forlorn in the airy chaos of change. The Civic Repertory did far better with the play than James B. Fagan did last spring and Nazimova played beautifully as Madame Ravensky.

In 1903, Nazimova made her first appearance in St. Petersburg. At that time she was 24; she had graduated from the Moscow Conservatory of Music, played in amateur theatricals and studied at the Stanislavsky School. Her fame in the U. S. increased from the time when she arrived from London with The Chosen People until the time of her world tour under Charles Frohman, in 1914 and 1915. After that she became famed to a new generation in many mediocre cinemas. Her appearance last week, despite her excellence, was in a way melancholy; it was that of an actress who had begun her career in the tradition of Bernhardt and Duse and was now emerging from a period in which she had been unable quite to maintain the cheap tradition of Mary Pickford, Laura La Plante and a thousand other girls with golden hair.