New Plays in Manhattan

Your Uncle Dudley introduces Walter Connolly as a smalltown sport and civic hero whose services promoting bazaars and festivals have won him a collection of loving cups from the grateful citizenry. This infantile and lovable fellow's desire to marry a. Danish beauty depends on his niece's winning $5,000 in a singing contest. How the prize was lost but Mr. Connolly's bride was won is a story which becomes a bit too long in the last act. It involves, however, some excellent villainy on the part of the niece's mother (Beatrice Terry, niece of the late great Dame Ellen Terry) as well as homely humors by her grandmother (Mrs. Jacques Martin). Mr. Connolly is frequently ludicrous as the thwarted swell who buys a malacca stick but is forced to hide it in his trouser leg until he gets out of sight of his less extravagant relatives.

A Ledge. Four business partners hold a sombre "conference. One of them has stolen some of the firm's securities and the evidence points to the handsome, heretofore spotless Richard Legrange. Bearing in mind the ordeals by fire and water with which savage tribesmen test virtue, the businessmen devise an ordeal by dizziness for Legrange. He must walk from one window to another along a four-inch ledge on the outside of the building which, at that point, is 200 feet above ground. If he falls, his death will be announced as suicide; if he accomplishes the feat the whole matter will promptly be forgotten. Needless to say, Legrange treads the ledge safely, guilty only of shielding a woman's guilt. The harrowing quality of the ledge scene fails to mitigate Playwright Paul Osborn's long, tedious stretches. This idle melodrama is the second presentation of the New York Theatre Assembly which, sponsored by wealthy, smart Manhattanites, exists to present "amusing plays, in an intimate theatre, before a selected audience." A Ledge follows an exceedingly short-lived comedy called Lolly (TIME, Oct. 28).

It Never Rains. What with a Donovan family from Boston who visit a Rogers family in Los Angeles, a subsequent interfamily love affair, and plenty of old jokes about California climate and real estate, the fabric of this play is mere burlap. One shining thread is woven through it in the fat shape of Mrs. Rogers' girlhood suitor who returns wealth, laden with bonbons, declaring: "With me, everything is a message to Garcia!"

Claire Adams depicts the Jobian trials of a young newspaperman who is persuaded by his bride to leave spacious Waco, Tex., for a one-room flat in Manhattan. The city's restless vastitude soon undermines his ambition; he is unable to write his novel, is too frequently in need of sleep. Meanwhile his wife experiments with a wealthy fellow, gets in deeper and deeper, is finally implicated in a knife murder which her husband is sent to report. It is a sordid, ordinary tragedy, conceived and acted without much imagination. A Primer for Lovers. Playwright William Hurlbut once concerned himself with such austere subjects as the psychological borderland between religion and sex (Bride of the Lamb). In his newest play austerity has given way to ribaldry, sex is uncomplicated by religion. Manhattan dramacritics hailed it as bald, unblushing. Some of them inclined to consider it dull. This judgment, if you are not lulled to sleep by a series of marches and countermarches in boudoir land, is open to dispute. For despite its tail coats, pajamas and cocktails, the play is a pungent pastry out of the same sort of oven as produced the Restoration comedies.

Unctuous Robert Warwick appears as a wealthy gentleman who yearns after a lovely virgin (Rose Hobart) but gets instead the wife of one of his friends through her own chicanery in a darkened room. This lady's husband is in turn involved with Mr. Warwick's wife and the virgin moves safely toward matrimony with a gracious man-about-town. The bedroom doors are all well oiled; they function silently, ceaselessly. What philosophy the play contains issues from the mouth of matronly Alison Skipworth as a Long Island Wife of Bath. Early in the evening she observes: "There is a spirit of unrest in the air, and one feels the breath of Eros blowing in from the garden." Later she delivers a homily on the piquancy of Victorian underwear. She also says: "I often sit and wonder what one could do nowadays to be declasse."

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