New Plays in Manhattan

Stepping Sisters is a loudly hilarious farce which concerns itself with the fortunes of three retired burlesque actresses who once carried spears on the Columbia circuit in the days when "it was a privilege to have your picture in the Police Gazette." They meet for the first time in 20 years. It develops that Cecelia ("Sissy") Ramsey (Theresa Maxwell Conover) aspires to a place in Patchogue, L. I., society; that Regina ("Queenie") Chetworth-Lynde (Helen Raymond) has become a Shakespearean; that Rose ("Rosie") La Marr (Grace Huff) is still in burlesque, but as a producer.

The occasion for the muster at Patchogue is a socialite benefit performance. And although the onetime troupers are delighted to see one another again, Sissy and Queenie are loth to admit publicly their acquaintanceship with Rosie and the spangled past. But after Sissy's daughter marries a musicomedian, and after Sissy's husband admits clandestine friendship for the free-and-easy Rosie, and after Patchogue society ostracizes Sissy's entire household, the curtain bangs down on a scene of beer-drinking good-fellowship between the aging handmaidens of Buffoonery.

Room 349. Among recent plays with plots based partially upon true stories are: An American Tragedy, Machinal, Spellbound, Jarnegan, Gods of the Lightning, Rope's End, Dishonored Lady. Of the true-story school also is Room 349--"a play etched from life"--which attempts to capitalize the murder of the late Arnold Rothstein, Manhattan mountebank, who was mysteriously shot in Room No. 349 of the Park Central Hotel on Nov. 4, 1928, in circumstances which suggested that he had been remiss about paying his gambling debts (TIME, Dec. 24, 1928).

The first scene is in the hall outside Room No. 349 in the Royal Hotel. Several people seemed interested in doing away with Hero Harold Stromberg when suddenly comes the report of a revolver. Next scene occurs in the fatal room itself with Mr. Stromberg--acted by cinema villain Roy D'Arcy (The Merry Widow) --lying near death from a gunshot wound. Grouped about him are his henchmen and his beauteous blonde girl-friend Babette Marshall, whose part is taken by the suntanned companion of the late Gambler Rothstein, Inez Norton, a stroke of showmanship calculated to add to the play's veracity. Mr. Stromberg expires after exhorting his minions to "treat her square, treat her square!"

Then follows the courtroom scene in which "Sandy" Tully (Jack Hartley), good friend of the deceased, is being tried for Stromberg's murder on very thin evidence indeed. Just as a witness is about to tell all he knows, a fusillade rings out from an upper box of the theatre, thus somehow terminating the legal proceedings. Last act is a flashback to Room No. 349, a scene in which Mr. Stromberg is portrayed as being wise, powerful, philanthropic, tender. His short temper, his desire to "quit the racket" and marry Babette are given as reasons for the quarrel and the shooting. But the shooting occurs in the dark, just where audiences were left, along with the New York Police Department, after the actual Rothstein killing.

Little Orchid Annie. The heroine of this rather determinedly smutty comedy is an ingenuous, not-beautiful-but-dumb mannequin in Mme Elaine's wholesale dress house, who cannot understand why a man named Kuppenheimer and another named Graham shower her with motors, apartments, jewelry.

Climax of the show comes at a Christmas Eve baby party given by Annie. There, attired in rompers, Little-Boy-Blue suits and diapers, Annie's two good friends and the young man to whom she is secretly married and is sending through Yale become embroiled in a free-for-all and are taken to jail. Virtue triumphant, everything turns out all right on Christmas day.

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