New Plays in Manhattan

Jenny. So long as Jane Cowl appears delightfully arch, points her wit with her own sly, luscious laughter and plays the scales with her throaty voice, she will receive plenty of homage. But many of her admirers who see her in Jenny will wonder why so subtle and personable an actress permits herself to appear in such a stale, superficial play. Co-Playwrights Margaret Ayer Barnes and Edward Sheldon have pictured John R. Weatherby, a corporation lawyer who has pampered his family until they are all incorrigible. His wife's senile intimacies with a Russian prince and a willowy interior decorator are nauseating; his elder married daughter is verging on adultery; his subdebutante child reeks of alcohol; his undergraduate son is a bumptious cad.

Lawyer Weatherby is forlorn and frustrated until one evening when Miss Cowl strolls into his living room as Jenny Valentine, a famed actress. She immediately perceives that, despite his greying hair and prowess at the bar, he is a small boy beset by vultures. Sharing his enthusiasm for roses and stamp-collecting, she wins his confidence, lures him away to her camp in the hills, where, after a great deal of coy urgency on her part, he consents to stay.

When he returns after this idyll, his family are still so impossible that he deserts them forever for Miss Cowl. Not, however, before she has given them a rhetorical strafing which is the epitome of hokum.

Guy Standing is indeed a lovable Mr. Weatherby, but his seduction in the mountain shack is somewhat repulsive. Autumnal passion is not particularly engrossing except to psychologists and sardonic novelists. Unless it be handled with the utmost finesse, is a questionable theme for light comedy, and in Jenny it is presented with a clumsy schoolboy suggestiveness.

June Moon. Ring W. Lardner and George S. Kaufman are the authors of this satire on the noisiest of all "rackets," music publishing. It is as funny as a fusion of such wits would lead one to expect. Mr. Lardner has even gone so far as to write several crack-brained chansons which no one will be able to whistle but which everyone will want to hear again. The negligible story tells of a boy (Norman Foster) who leaves Schenectady to write lyrics in Manhattan. His June Moon is a success and, having narrowly escaped marriage with a shapely extortionist (Lee Patrick), he weds the blonde chit whom he first met on the train (Linda Watkins).

What is really important is the fact that Messrs. Lardner and Kaufman show themselves to be irreverent Boswells of Tin Pan Alley. They know, for instance, all about its soiled, impertinent goddesses. One of these creatures, played with frightening rancor by Jean Dixon, scourges her husband with wisecracks because his "Paprika, You're the Spice of My Life" is the only song hit he has written in three years. "That's the place for you," she says, upon learning that the Hall of Fame is devoted to "Busts." When he sings her his new "Montana Moon" she stares at him in still, awful malignance which will amuse anyone who enjoys sadistic spectacles.

In the last act she becomes the mistress of another man, but despite her verbal vitriol and her sins she remains one of the most appealing characters on Broadway. Alfred Emanuel Smith, who at tended the opening night, thought so. Said he: "I didn't like that blonde girl taking a red dress from a man that wasn't her husband. I liked her too much. I wish she hadn't done it." The frenzied troubadours themselves gather in the publisher's offices. There a writer of novelty songs (Philip Loeb) has a hard time getting anyone to listen to his newest, called '"Give Our Child a Name" which begins:

Should a father's carnal sins

Blight the life of babykins?

Also present is a roly-poly, dark-jowled pianist (Harry Rosenthal). Asked if he has been through the Holland Tunnel, he replies. "No, I'm waiting for someone to go with.'' And a song entitled "There Never Was A Girl Like Mother" prompts his remark, "Maybe it's all for the best."

The lunacy that sprouts in Mr. Lardner's humor is doubtless responsible for the entrance of a character billed simply as A Man Named Brainard. His incessant query, "Have you seen two men?" trebles the merriment which at that moment, and throughout the play, is loud and prolonged.

Ring W. Lardner is a six-footer with unusually large, bushy eyebrows. He lives in Great Neck, L. I., calls his wife Mrs. Lardner "for lack of a more poignant name," has four sons between the ages of 10 and 16. Famed for telling fables about himself, he is nonetheless known to have been an able sports writer who broke away from that desk after the Wartime publication of his letters in the vernacular (You Know Me, Al'). He has since written what some critics call the best short stories in the U. S. language, from one of which, Some Like Them Cold, the play June Moon was freely adapted.

George S. Kaufman, longtime dramatic-editor of the New York Times, has written several smash hits in collaboration with his fellow Manhattan wit. Marc Connelly (Dulcy, To the Ladies, Merton of the Movies, Beggar on Horseback). By himself he wrote The Butter and Egg Man, with Novelist Edna Ferber The Royal Family. Hailing from Pittsburgh, he is a saturnine fellow who talks to himself, avoids vegetables, is addicted to card games and chocolate peppermints.

Mademoiselle Bourrat. Eva Le Gallienne's Civic Repertory Theatre presents for its second new production of the season a play by M. Claude Anet, French novelist, who last year told Mid-western clubwomen about love. In Mlle Bourrat he fixes on one of the familiar, tragic aspects of his favorite subject. Returning from a fin de siecle convent little Mlle Bourrat, like most French bourgeois daughters, was penned within the drawn shutters of her home, there to sew and wonder while her parents bargained for a bridegroom. Sometimes her steely mother permitted her to wander in the gardens, where one day she was deflowered by young Celestin, the gardener, whose bronzed arms had strangely attracted her.

Through drear winter months of pregnancy, her mother plotted desperately to avoid the fusillade of village gossip which would destroy the family if once it began. The piteous tearful prisoner sat in a gloomy room with many strands of wool across her lap to excuse her from rising. Few sat with her except M. Allemand, her piano teacher, whose myopic eyes were sharper than anyone imagined.

The baby was born, died. M. Allemand--the only one who knew--forced his hand, won the girl for his wife, thus vastly increasing his social status. But by that time he had become village librarian and Mme Bourrat devised a theory that he was the bastard son of a noble, thereby salving her own social consciousness and impressing her relatives. As for the girl--she would have been happy to marry anyone.

The pallid, pretty face of Josephine Hutchinson, playing Mlle Bourrat, is a frail tissue rent with bewilderment and agony. Also in the cast is her mother, Leona Roberts, ridiculous as a hobbling, puffing aunt. Eva Le Gallienne does not appear, but her associates make this simple story a rich miniature of provincial weal and woe.

Karl and Anna. Men who fall in love with women merely by hearing about them or looking at their photographs or reading their letters are usually found only in empurpled romances. The Theatre Guild's seasonal curtain-raiser attempts to make such a man seem a creature of reality. In a Russian prison camp, Hero Karl is tortured by the lash of his captors and by the sick, contagious desire of his fellow-prisoner Richard for his wife Anna. Richard vividly describes Anna's habits, her womanliness, the mole on her hip, until Karl feels that he knows her as well as her husband and wants her even more.

Escaping from prison, he makes his way back to the Berlin kitchen-apartment where Anna has chastely waited three years for Richard's return. She is amazed at this stranger who presumes to call himself Richard, who claims to be her pre-ordained spouse, who knows already the secrets of her bed. Whoever he is, wherever he obtained his bewildering knowledge of herself, he is warm, intimate, mystically compelling. So much so, that when stodgy Richard does return, she blasts his life by going away with Karl.

German Novelist Leonhard Frank adapted this play from his novel of the same name. Despite the subtle services of Alice Brady, making her Guild debut, and of Otto Kruger and Frank Conroy, the weird passion of Karl and Anna remains fabulous, as insubstantial as the fictions of Graustark.

Her Friend the King. William Faversham is a vestige of that genial era, not long past, when certain actors with favorable features had but to smile manfully, lift their eyebrows and bring down the house. These popular fellows appeared in mellow legends which were just militaristic enough to permit them to wear epaulets, but not belligerent enough to ruffle their hair. One of the playwrights who devised their handsome parades is A. E. Thomas. Actor Faversham and Playwright Thomas are now responsible for this play about a King who retained his throne through the clever beneficence of a U. S. dowager. Its strategems never endanger the bland Mr. Faversham. He still stands erect, having batteries of binoculars. Drama-tasters who like the vintage of 1912 will be as happy as Mr. Faversham at his inconsequential graces.