New Plays in Manhattan

Street Scene. The Manhattan house is divided against itself. There are apartments on both sides of the hall, on every floor. The June day has been a scorcher --"Hottest July fifteent' in fawty-one yizz. Yeah. Six dead in Chicago and no relief in sight, the paper says"--and Mrs. (First Floor) Florentine, Teuton wife of the Italian music teacher, is telling Mrs. (Second Floor) Jones how she "sveat all day, took a bat and sveat some more." Abraham Kaplan, also first floor, strains his eyes, moves his lips as he reads the Jewish Forward in the sultry dusk.

A man in a dinner jacket breezes by, stick in hand, passes the group at No. 346. Nobody notices him. He ignores them. They never will meet again.

Mrs. Maurrant pokes her head out of a second-story window. There is talk of the heat and Mrs. Jones, on the porch, asks Mrs. Maurrant to come down and have a chat. ''Well, maybe I will," says Mrs. Maurrant. She withdraws from the window frame and while she is coming downstairs Mrs. Jones asks Mrs. Fiorentino if it isn't awful, the way Mrs. Maurrant is carrying on with that Sankey, who collects money for the Borden milk people. Mrs. Maurrant appears and there is banal chatter. Mr. (Third Floor) Buchanan, whose wife is in laboring pains, says a few words. Mrs. Jones admonishes him to give Mrs. Buchanan plenty of food, 'Remember, she's got two to feed."

Frank Maurrant, belligerently righteous stagehand, appears. He is the type that lives with his lower teeth bared. Filippo Fiorentino, music teacher, appears, bearing ice cream cones for everybody. Mrs. Hildebrand and tots appear in time to be caught by a social service worker as they come from the movies: they have been living on charity since Mr. Hildebrand ran off with another woman. More talk of the heat. The crowd disperses. It is quiet except for the rumble of the subway, the bell of a fire engine, the bark of a dog. Mrs. Maurrant's daughter Rose appears with a man. He is Harry Easter, office manager. He tries to kiss Rose, but fails. He propositions her; she is too beautiful, too clever for office work. He has a friend who will get her on Broadway. All she has to do is leave home and be available for Mr. Easter at a little apartment he will get for her. She desists. He leaves.

She sits on the porch steps and Vincent Jones, taxi-driving son of the Second Floor Joneses, slides over beside her. '' . . . Say, sweetie, I'll give you two bucks if you'll let me snap your garter." He is overheard by Sammy Kaplan, who loves Rose. Kaplan makes a feeble attempt to attack Jones, but Vincent is far too strong, easily spins Sammy to the ground. Mrs. Jones appears. "Now Vincent, you mustn't do that. .

" Next morning stagehand Frank Maurrant leaves for Stamford, a show is trying out there. Mrs. Maurrant tells Sankey, her lover. He goes upstairs. The curtains are drawn. Sammy Kaplan sees Sankey go upstairs, sees the shade lowered.

Maurrant appears, drunk. He has changed his mind about the Stamford trip. Instinctively he looks upstairs, becomes insanely enraged. Sammy tries, ineffectually, to stop Maurrant's rush to the second floor There are screams and bellowing curses. Maurrant and Sankey struggle at the window, Maurrant at Sankey 's throat. There are shots. A crowd collects at the door. Maurrant escapes. Sankey is dead. Mrs. Maurrant opens her eyes only once.

In the afternoon two child's nurses push perambulators upon the scene. "Three-fawty-six. Yeah. This heah's the place." Fascinated they stand, gibbering, comparing the scene with a tabloid's composograph of the murder.

Life goes on as usual. The murderer is caught. The Hildebrands are dispossessed. Sammy Kaplan, with his overdose of Schopenhauer, loves Rose; she loves him. Something will come of that, surely.

This is one of the best plays of the sea son. 'Only one other play (Wings Over Europe) is nearly so well-cast for types, but it is possible to mention more notable parts most notably played. Erin O'Brien-Moore is beautiful and restrained as Rose Maurrant. Robert Kelly is a powerful Frank Maurrant. Best of all the characterizations is Beulah Bondi's Emma Jones.

Able Elmer Rice wrote the play and directed it. The single setting of the Manhattan home -- once drearily respectable, now only dreary -- is by Jo Meilziner.

The Marriage Bed is Ernest Pascal's dramatization of his novel, which attracted by it? By its clinical title, and was swept into the ephemeral list of bestsellers. The play opened last week in Manhattan after a happy spell (with a Hollywood cast) on the Pacific coast (TIME, Oct. 29). Mary Boyd (Ann Davis) the "thirtyish" but personable wife of George Boyd (Allan Dinehart) is apprised, by her meddling mother (Elizabeth Patterson), of Boyd's unfaithfulness. To Rochester he has gone on a business trip, accompanied by Christine Kennedy (Helen Flint); openly he has carried on the affair with Christine. But Mary stills her mother's blabbing by telling her that the affair is no news to her; she has known it for months. Boyd and his mistress come to Mary to ask her for a divorce but she contemptuously refuses to give up Boyd and wreck a home for an infatuation. Only when Mary's younger sister, Cecily Reid (Helen Chandler) confesses her own affair with her architect-employer, husband of a woman much older than himself, does Mary consent to a divorce. But Christine has a change of heart, leaves Boyd.

The straying husband returns to see his young son who he has learned is ill. Young son's illness is slight, and between father and son there is more talk about a bicycle, approval of which Mary Boyd has withheld. With Christine turned moral and Mary refusing to marry Boyd's best friend--and Cecily eloping with her architect--the play ends in this manner:

Boyd: Mary? Mary, there's something I want to talk about.

Mary: Yes?

Boyd: Mary, about that bicycle.

The settings are good enough even for a cast so able. Ann Davis is thoroughly suburban and extremely capable; the veteran Elizabeth Patterson as the interloping mother was so good that an affected audience forgot to applaud her. For deft comedy there was Ernest Wood, as the other harassed son-in-law of Elizabeth Patterson. He looks not unlike famed Critic Robert Charles Benchley and is an equally good actor. Helen Flint, last seen in Gentlemen of the Press, again whines effectively as the sirenical bug in the matrimonial cot.

Polly. This piece serves as the coming-out party for that English music hall favorite who calls herself simply June, whose full name is June Tripp. For an hour or so it hews with fidelity to the lines of Polly With a Past, onetime (1917) Belasco success. A little innocent (June) agrees to pose as a French demimonde and pretend an affair with Rex Van Zile (John Hundley) to arouse the jealousy of a socialite whom Van Zile loves. Little Innocent already is in love with Van Zile but he remains sternly aloof until he kisses her. Follows naturally, the business of buying off the supposedly scarlet woman, her tearing up bribe-checks, her breaking heart, his outraged sense of decency when she, making a gesture of renunciation, does an adagio dance in deshabille. Inevitably. love conquers all.

June is a graceful sprite of indeterminate age, whose voice would be too good to keep her long in a U. S. chorus, but whose legs would not get her there in the first place. More important than her Broadway debut is the appearance of Fred Allen, glib veteran of the variety stage from whose painfully pursed lips dribble more and better quips than from any mouth save the ever-open one of Groucho (Animal Crackers) Marx.

The lyrics by Irving Caesar are in the Lorenz Hart manner; the music, assembled in part by able Phillip Charig, is mediocre: the best tune is "Sweet Liar." The chorus is the tallest in Manhattan and is notable for comely faces.

Vermont. Though Phyllis Povah is a brilliant, charming, sensible actress, she cannot make it seem less absurd to a Manhattan audience that a pretty country lass should be rendered tearful because her brother sometimes gets drunk.

Perhaps in rural places such as the one where Vermont has its scene, the chief emotional situation will not seem foolish: if it can be accepted the play is good. It concerns a farm family which is gradually impaired by, not rum, but rumination on the injustice of the Eighteenth Amendment. First the eldest son goes blind on whiskey. Then old Pap takes bribes to let bootleg trucks use his old red barn for a garage. The second son becomes a guide to 'leggers; he is imprisoned. Ann Carter who winces at all these awful turns, at last trips off the stage in close company with the happy-go-lucky devil's advocate, who has involved the Carter tribe in lawbreaking. He has promised her to give up badness.

There is fine comedy in Vermont. A strange old woman (Kate Mayhew) listens to a radio, wheezing with soft insanity in her kitchen; "How they do improve," she mutters, clicking her teeth in wonder, and referring to the race of man.

There are also interludes of dullness which can easily be cut out. A. E. Thomas. writer of the play, follows the custom of this season by prowling onto the stage himself. He impersonates a Vermont district attorney with an accent which he must have learned in the damp parlors of Manhattan.

Follow Thru. It was only necessary to take one look at Zelma O'Neal to know that everything would be all right. Both pretty and without inhibitions, she tunefully remarked: "I Want to be Bad," illustrating her desire with stamps, wind-ups, moues, and fetching wriggles. When she fell in love, she urged her inamorato to "Take good care of yourself, you belong to me," beating him gently on the chest. So did the audience belong to her, though she abused her property by making such cynical comments as this, to a recalcitrant lover: "You can't have children by telephone."

Her recalcitrant lover, a timidly lecherous golfer whose eyebrows kept going back on him whenever he saw a pretty girl, was Jack Haley, an infallible absurdity. When he broached the matter of his grandmother's bed, someone suggested that it was probably one of those beds George Washington had slept in. "We could never get Grandma to admit it." said the unilateral Haley. More samples of locker room esprit were forthcoming; John Sheehun, a sturdier comedian, described taking a bath as "dunking the body."

Locker room wit is not out of place in Follow Thru for the plot concerns golf; its hero is a young professional, his romance begins when he agrees to give lessons to a pretty girl and comes to its proper conclusion when she beats a rival in love and .port. The story winds happily about the verandas, hallways, fairways and even the ladies' dressing room in an Elysian country club, encouraged by nymphs of whom none have passed the age of indiscretion, all dancing to Henderson, Brown & de Sylvan melodies.