New Plays in Manhattan

Mei Lan-Fang, China's greatest actor (TIME, Feb. 17), began a two weeks' engagement in Manhattan by presenting selections from his repertoire of some 400 plays:

The Suspected Slipper concerns the return of a warrior to his wife after years in battle. All goes well until the couple retire, when the warlord discovers a strange slipper in the nuptial chamber. The wife coquettishly pretends that she has transgressed, that another has been buying her rice, occupying her bed. As she describes him, her raging husband perceives that the description fits one whom he has seen killed that very day. Then the tragic truth is made manifest--that the slipper belongs to the couple's own son, grown to manhood while his father was away.

The End of the "Tiger" General depicts the fate of Fei Chen-O, a court lady who is claimed in marriage by the conqueror of her nation. When the victor sends his "Tiger" General to marry the girl in his stead, Fei Chen-O gets the general exceedingly drunk and stabs him to death in the marriage bed. Then, having revenged her people, she slays herself.

The King's Parting with His Favorite discloses a woebegone king who must hasten off to battle, whom nothing can console until his favorite does her sword dance, after which he is exultant and leaves her to her moaning. Oldest of Mei Lan-Fang's selections, this play was written two centuries before Christ.

Simple as these tales, their presentation is made to seem curious to occidentals by the antique conventions of Chinese drama. A formalized art, devoid of spontaneity and realism, it uses little scenery other than chairs and tables which may represent almost any architectural feature. The actor expresses himself in turn by speech singing, gymnastics and dancing. Fearsome, comic masks and face-painting, costumes, and a whole intricate play of gesture have complex, traditional significances (stooping, for instance, means passing under a lintel, i. e., entering another house). The singing is accompanied by one musician producing whining, squealing sounds on the Hu-ch'in (bamboo bow-and-string instrument), by others tapping wood blocks, striking cymbals, plunking rudimentary banjos. Their approaches to harmony are painful to western ears; their rhythms are often complex syncopations, recognizable by jazz enthusiasts.

Mei Lan-Fang's genius, say his Chinese critics, resides in the perfection with which he executes the bewildering Chinese orthodoxy of posture and diction. Playing his feminine roles he seemed like a painting of Hui Tsung miraculously come to elastic, undulating life. His dances with swords and wands possessed an extraordinarily feline continuity of movement. His falsetto was harsh but expressive. Watching his gait, his play with hands and voluminous sleeves, his tender coquetry, you could understand why Chinese poets have written panegyrics about his eye, smile, shoulder, even his waist.

Topaze is a graceful and ever so Gallic play about graft in which the characters bear such names as Castel-Benac, Tronche-Bobine and Pitart-Vignolles, and act accordingly. It is the wistful, pathetic, ludicrous history of M. Topaze, a sad-eyed French schoolmaster with a beard, who was ousted from his classroom because he persisted in telling a wealthy parent the truth about her repulsive and boobish child. Not that M. Topaze objected to offering flattery--he was merely too simple ever to have conceived of it. He lived in a world governed by the axioms which he had tried vainly to teach to his small boys. Consequently when he fell in love with the mistress of the politician Castel-Benac, she easily persuaded M. Topaze to become that scoundrel's unconscious tool. And even when M. Topaze learned the truth and spent his days quivering with remorse and fright, and disguising his voice over the telephone, he still kept his position out of his love for the siren.

M. Castel-Benac was an expert in civic corruption. Perhaps his most nefarious enterprise was the erection of a public lavatory just opposite a cafe. When the proprietor objected to this juxtaposition, M. Castel-Benac charged him a fat sum for haulage, then moved his lavatory down the street and established it opposite another cafe. But M. Castel-Benac made one tactical mistake. Having determined to rid his office of the gibbering and useless M. Topaze, he procured a farewell gift for that pedagog by gentle blackmail. It was the particular gleam which M. Topaze had long been following--a degree of Doctor of Moral Philosophy. And when he received it, the schoolmaster was transmogrified. A year later he had become a super-politician, beardless, monocled, fastidiously draped, who had gigantically dishonest deals as far as South America, had acquired M. Castel-Benac's office and was about to acquire M. Castel-Benac's dutiful Suzv.

The play was adapted by Benn W. Levy from the French of Marcel Pagnol. It is a preposterous fable about an incredible ass. But its exaggerations are those of a sophisticate who embellishes his careless satires with delicately hilarious details. Frank Morgan as M. Topaze apparently does not mind the fact that his role is basically unbelievable. He makes the figure by turns pitiful and ridiculous and frequently almost real. It is perhaps the most enjoyable of his many fine performances. Phoebe Foster is sleek and chiselled, a decorative element without which the play would not have been properly translated.

The Last Mile is a horrible and sickening play--the most repulsive play now to be seen in Manhattan. There will be a great deal of discussion as to whether it is art or merely nauseous and falsifying realism. But if art includes the clarification of vital experience through order and insight, then this play, which sensitively depicts one of the most terrible predicaments into which life forces its unfortunates, must surely be construed as esthetic.

It is the predicament of the condemned--of men waiting for the electric chair. The first act is an agonizing crescendo leading to an execution. The murderer is given a lavish meal which he cannot eat, cigarets which he is unable to finish. His temples are shaved for one electrical contact ; his trousers are slit for another. The sacrament is administered. He passes each of the other six cells in the Death House on his way to a green door. The other six of the doomed wait in silence until the lights go dim, indicating that the prison dynamo is working at its peak. In the next two acts rebellion occurs. While machine guns clatter and sirens whine outside, the most desperate of the rebels threatens to shoot hostages in cold blood if means of escape are not granted. They are not, and he kills an assistant warder, and a turnkey. A lull comes at nightfall while a searchlight sweeps the grated windows; there are three rebels left and only two bullets. Hope has long since gone. Even the shooting of the warden had been an act not so much of hope as of protest against a life in which such a steely, stifling enigma as the Death House could exist. Ultimately one of the survivors walks out to death by machine gun, leaving the others to divide the remaining cartridges.

The Last Mile is written by John Wexley. onetime actor with Eva Le Gallienne's Civic Repertory Theatre, now playing the locksmith in Leo Bulgakov's revival of Maxim Gorki's At the Bottom, familiarly known as The Lower Depths (TIME, Jan. 20). It is said that his play follows the outline of actual events which took place in Colorado, that he has utilized Death House dialog as transcribed by an inmate. The play is performed by a cast of 16 men. It is an experience for those who can stomach it.

Joseph. The Biblical Joseph was an earnest and moral slave who repulsed the advances of the wife of his master Potiphar, because he was grateful for Potiphar's kindness and wanted no illicit fun in the first place. Joseph's nobility suffers in the theatrical version of him conceived by Playwright Bertram Bloch and performed by George Jessel. They make it quite clear that he balked at adultery not because of lofty scruples, but because he was afraid Neris would ultimately fling him to the crocodiles, her customary farewell to outworn lovers. Actor Jessel, swarthy, expressive young Hebrew, makes Joseph as glib, crafty and loquacious as a Jewish press agent, driving bargains which Potiphar, played by the splendidly silly Ferdinand Gottschalk, is too stupid to see, digging irrigation ditches because he does not believe in the pluvial generosity of the Egyptian gods, and finally escaping execution by persuading his gaoler that the gaol can be made to pay. Actor Jessel has hitherto been vaudevillian in his tendencies; now he shows himself as a player both subtle and adroit. In conjunction with Playwright Bloch's originality and George S. Kaufman's shrewd direction, this results in one of the season's more amusing pieces.

Ripples. Fred Stone is back on the stage again after the airplane accident which damaged his agile legs and threatened to eliminate him as chief U. S. entertainer of children and the child-element in grownups. Mrs. Stone is with him as usual; so is his daughter Dorothy; so is another daughter Paula, who thereby makes her theatrical debut. Paula is prettier than Dorothy but cannot dance as nimbly. Fred seems not at all stiff and evokes great glee in his admirers by making a characteristically acrobatic entrance, as though he had been kicked by a horse and landed in a bed of tulips. The story of this musicomedy describes a lazy and bibulous old liar who called himself a descendant of Rip Van Winkle and actually saw dwarfs and played at bowls in the Catskills (this is all logically accounted for by the fact that the dwarfs were making a cinema). A romance is provided for each of the Stone daughters, and Joseph Urban's decor is picturesque.

Out of a Blue Sky. The impeccable actor Leslie Howard has adapted this play from the German of one Hans Chlumberg and the time that both gentlemen have spent on it has been wasted. Herr Chlumberg is a devotee of the old theatrical dogma that the people in the audience are apt to be much more interesting than those on the stage. He pretends that a company which was to have presented Camille has failed to arrive, that the stage manager is therefore forced to call upon the audience for volunteers. Katherine Wilson, Reginald Owen and Warren William then pretend that they are members of the audience and climb upon the stage to act an impromptu triangle drama which is routine and stupid. There is a certain amount of pleasure in watching the accomplished Reginald Owen as the potential cuckold; with a certain technique familiar to the old burlesque halls, involving considerable shouting and blatant fatuity, he makes his role amusing in a way that Herr Chlumberg probably never anticipated.

Ruth Selwyn's Nine Fifteen Revue advertises music and sketches by such names as Gershwin, Herbert, Friml, Youmans, Lardner, Cantor, Loos. Its best music, however, consists of "Knock on Wood" by a relatively unknown composer named Richard Myers and "Get Happy' by one Harold Arlen. And its best comedy emanates from Fred Keating, a young magician, who is able not only to make a canary and its cage vanish from between his finger tips, but even imparts a certain blithe elegance to the art of wizardry which in recent years, no matter how bewildering its feats, has been regarded in a class with yodeling and imitating General Grant. The blonde and lissome Ruth Etting sings several urgent songs and Busby Berkeley has arranged excellent dances. The ceremonies are of the sort known as intimate; they are also diverting, and they begin late enough to allow you to finish your demi-tasse or your grog.

It's a Grand Life. Dramacritics are always finding it necessary to say either that Mrs. Fiske spoils a play or that a play spoils Mrs. Fiske. The talents of this mature, facile comedienne peculiarly fit her for cultivated banter; and banter, suave or not, is hardly descriptive of the dialog of Ibsen, into which, in her time, Mrs. Fiske has made such disastrous inroads. On the other hand, civilized comedies appropriate to her gifts are not being written as often as the sophistication of the time would lead one to expect.

Her present drama is a case in point. She is called upon to portray a shrewd and tolerant Park Avenue matron who has to adjust the difficulties of her grey-haired, licentious husband, her fickle and amorous daughter, and her stripling son who has married a dancer. When one of her husband's mistresses declares that he is a man of surprises, Mrs. Fiske replies: "Don't tell me anything I shouldn't know." It would be well if the play preserved this cheery attitude, if it contained more such agreeable detail as a burlesque on a reporter from the cultivated New York Times, who enters tail-coated and gracious, sniffs a glass of chartreuse and announces: "What an exquisite bouquet!'' But the playwrights forego all this jollity to deal with the repellent fact that the son's cabaret bride had once had transactions with his father. Unless it were treated with tragic nobility this theme would inevitably be odoriferous. Occurring in the midst of farce it is doubly rank. Why Mrs. Fiske is willing to submit to such indignities she alone can tell.

Hatcher Hughes and Alan Williams wrote the play. Mr. Hughes's talents would seem to have deteriorated since his Pulitzer-prizewinning Hell-Bent jer Heaven (1923). Further conceptions of this sort he might well keep in the cloistral isolation of Columbia University, where he lectures on the Drama.

Ritzy will provide excellent fun for all convention delegates spending an evening at the theatre and for all ladies' theatre parties in which no one is going to write a paper. A young $10,000-a-year married couple have scarcely risen from their daybed when they are notified that they have inherited $200,000. Appalling expenditure is the order of the day until evening, when they find that the will has been justly contested. Ernest Truex is chief farceur.

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