New Plays in Manhattan

The Long Road. Given an inferior actor for the leading role. The Long Road might have been a well-documented, thoughtful, but overlong play. Playwright Hugh Stange (Veneer, Fog-Bound) apparently has a talent for the sort of literary clairvoyance which goes well in novels, but he lacks the ability to condense, solidify and invigorate his material for dramatic presentation. Only a superior player like Otto Kruger (The Game of Love & Death, Karl & Anna), whose Barrymorose features were used to great success in The Royal Family, could have succeeded in interpreting the nuances of Playwright Stange, breathing the breath of life into the character of a lovable, shy Brooklyn doctor.

The Long Road is a War play, "solemnly and tremulously" dedicated to a fallen comrade-in-arms of the author. Act I reveals the home life of Dr. Lovett & wife (Marion Wells), who has persuaded the unselfish practitioner to leave his small-town clientele so that she may have a chance to develop her musical talents in New York. Mr. Kruger announces that he has accepted a commission in the medical corps, departs for a Southern cantonment, leaving his wife exposed to a handsome artillery officer who shares her taste for music. Several acts later, by an odd topple of Fate's dice. Mr. Kruger finds himself attempting to save the life of the artillery captain by whom, Mr. Kruger has just learned, his wife has had a baby. The artillerist dies. After the War is over Mr. Kruger, himself wounded, comes home and undergoes some rather genuine-looking torture while his wife and he decide whether or not they will continue to live their lives together.

The scenes at the front are very stagey, with naughty Belgian girls, soldiers staggering about drunk or wounded, noise. Scenes in the Brooklyn flat, however, are gently paced, quietly moving.

The Up & Up is the sort of play in which the actors are all engaged in some form of nefarious and illegitimate enterprise, constantly flinging at each other such phrases as "Says you," "Is 'at so?", "Yeah?" It is the work of Eva Kay Flint and Martha Madison who turned out a creditable thriller last season called Subway Express.

It develops that "Doggie" (Donald MacDonald), the proprietor of a Bronx beer flat, and Bee (Sylvia Field) are living together only until Doggie's consumptive wife dies. After that Doggie has promised to make Bee "legitimate," a condition which she cherishes. But Doggie has a weakness for poker, a game at which he is invariably unsuccessful, so he and Bee are about to be ejected from their apartment. At this point appears "Curly," a bigtime horse race bookmaker. He volunteers to give Doggie and Bee lodgings which he and his associates use as a "phone room" (place to receive bets) during the daytime. Doggie is put in a bad light and Bee marries Curly. Eventually she comes back to Doggie.

The Up & Up is good melodramatic entertainment and is laudable if only for the fact that it brings William Foran back on the stage and puts a telephone in his hand. Mr. Foran's most notable telephonic achievement, however, still remains the flat, nasal-voiced query which he put to a non-existent lady in the Front Page: "Is it true, Mrs. Margolies, that you were the victim of a Peeping Tom? We just want the facts. What did he look like; did he look like a college professor?"

That's Gratitude. Just as surely as the Ladies' Home Journal relies on a steady and numerous audience of readers with wholesome if limited tastes, John Golden, the anti-dirt producer, depends on the great body of people who always flock to his innocent, folksy comedies (The 19th Hole, The First Year, Money From Home). Many of his shows have been written by and cast around Frank Craven, a genial oldtime trouper of the sort who waits for his laughs when he knows they are coming.

That's Gratitude, this season's Golden-Craven collaboration, is made up of sure-fire stuff. Tom Maxwell (George W. Barbier), a jolly, big-jowled old hypocrite who manufactures ink at Hutchinson, Kan., suffers a severe attack of indigestion while stopping at a smalltown Iowa hotel Another guest, Bob Grant (Mr. Craven), a theatrical manager whose field of endeavor is limited to producing second-run road shows, appears and succors the ink magnate with his last drink of whiskey. Whereupon Tom insists that Bob come home and stay with him. When Boh leaves Tom's he takes with him, over the protests of the family, daughter Delia, an extremely ugly duckling with a good voice. Bob renovates Delia, puts her in a show, falls in love with her, brings her back to Hutchinson. But Delia runs away with the tenor, leaving Bob and his show in sorry shape.

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