Little Theatre Tournament

The little theatres of the land are dens of morbidity and exoticism. This fact is always made apparent at Manhattan's annual Little Theatre Tournament. The seventh contest, held last week, was cut to the conventional pattern. Twenty amateur organizations competed, each presenting a one-act play. One group from Denver gave a horrific vignette by Eugene O'Neill in which a white couple and a Negro are shown adrift on a raft in tropic seas. Another Denver company chose for its dramatic locale a rainswept bit of Maine seacoast where the incessant downpour drove a bedraggled housewife insane, sent her out to follow the fancied ghost of a long-dead lover. Actors from Dayton, Ohio, were concerned with Zanzibar. Three Manhattan companies dealt, respectively, with Japan, Petrograd, the Crystal Caverns.

From Forest Hills, Long Island, scene of many a tennis championship, came an unusually polished coterie, the Gardens Players, with Sir James Matthew Barrie's piquant thriller Shall We Join the Ladies? This play, long a favorite at all-star frolics, depicts a British landowner of gentle mien and sinuous mind who has gathered about his dinner table twelve persons whom he suspects of the murder of his brother. He informs them lazily of the fact, cleverly casts suspicion on them all, tells them that certain postprandial actions will reveal the murderer. The ladies then retire. Over their wine, the men talk of poisons. There is a sudden feminine scream. The men rush out. The host quaffs his liqueur, slumps in his chair, dead.

These delicate, unsolved terrors were so sensitively evoked that the Gardens Players won the Cup donated by clerical-collared Producer David Belasco for the best production. There were also two $200 prizes for the best unpublished plays. Hudson Strode of Anniston, Ala., won one of these with The End of the Dance, as presented by the Anniston Little Theatre. It was silly drama about a woman with a weak heart who died after she learned that her husband, whom she had supposed a musical genius, was in reality an esthetic piddler.

Far better was The Severed Cord by Maxine Finsterwald of Manhattan, presented by a troupe from Sunnyside, Long Island. Psychologically acute, it portrayed a "scab" (strike-breaker), hated and despised by both his son and wife. When the scab's life was threatened the son was vindictive, exultant. But the wife's conscience, dependence and desire to humiliate the living man, conspired to prevent her from allowing the wretch to meet his fate.

Playwright Finsterwald is in her early twenties, a native Detroiter. Last year she was graduated from Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh, where, studying dramatics, she won an Otto Hermann Kahn prize for a four-act play called Giants and Chains.