New Plays in Manhattan

The Wiser They Are. Bruce Ingram had an uncanny fascination for women. They buzzed about him like gnats on a Mississippi mule. When he came home from Europe he was pursued all the way to his apartment by a Junoesque married lady. "How did it happen?" asked his friend.

"That's what I wondered," said Mr. Ingram, "when I woke up."

"And you call that living!"

"No. Traveling."

But then Mr. Ingram falls in love with his ward Trixie, a chronic flirt. Thereafter neither can trust the other. Even on their honeymoon they are tagged after by cast-off friends. And as the final curtain falls, although Mr. & Mrs. Ingram have settled their entanglemen's of the moment, one foresees for them a merry married life and a short one.

The Wiser They Are is Producer Jed Harris' lightest comedy to date. It is eminently agreeable, very amusing. Osgood Perkins left the cast of Philip Barry's Tomorrow & Tomorrow to take the part of Bruce Ingram. Urbane Mr. Perkins, whose dramatic touch is deft and definite, is quite at home under the Harris aegis. He was the kinetic editor of the now almost legendary Front Page, also the frustrated doctor of Uncle Vanya.

For the part of Trixie, Producer Harris selected Ruth Gordon (Hotel Universe, The Violet). Miss Gordon is one of the few actresses who can portray the character of a loose young girl without being offensive.

The Great Man is a cheap show about a pirate (Walter Woolf) who kills, conquers and seduces with equal good humor. In one of the towns he raids, the Governor's wife plans to protect her virtue by making herself ugly, sacrificing her unmarried niece. When the Governor's wife discovers what a handsome fellow Mr. Woolf is, she abandons her disguise. But by this time the niece is unwilling to give up the buccaneer, makes him marry her. Mr. Woolf, blustering about with hair on his chest, is embarrassingly exhibitionistic.

Joy Of Living is a comedy of German extraction. It uses four characters, the two most important being a gambler and the man whom he has made his valet in lieu of pressing for payment of gaming losses. After three acts of this entertainment, one concludes that hokum is the same the whole world over. Sample lines given to the female character named Ly, who intrudes into the gambler's flat: "They called me the tiger cat--and they had good reason for it. ... So he's the master and you're the valet, eh? Life's queer sometimes, isn't it?"

The Rap. The producers of this melodrama have concluded that, with Manhattan newspapers bearing tales of civic corruption on their front pages edition after edition, it is high time to have a play about crooked judges and police. In spite of its sensational and opportunistic motive, The Rap manages to be a pretty good crime play. It has to do with a lawyer and a reporter who are killed, one just as the spectators are getting their hats tucked under the seats. As the play continues its uneven but earnest way, it develops that someone with a cold hand has been perpetrating the various assaults and murders, someone, most likely, in the police department, for the constabulary of this mythical municipality is evidently a gang of thoroughgoing rogues. The question is: who is the owner of the cold, paralyzed hand?

Peter Ibbetson, As if to invite comparison with the Metropolitan Opera's recent production (TIME, Feb. 16), the Brothers Shubert have revived John N. Raphael's and Constance Collier's dramatization of George Louis Palmella Busson Du Maurier's Peter Ibbetson. As a libretto for Deems Taylor's music. Peter Ibbetson seemed peculiarly apt, and Joseph Urban did some notable settings for it. The Shuberts' play is not so well mounted. The fanciful story of two lovers who, parted as children, meet only in their dreams in later life and are only wholly reunited in death, is one which ; goes better with music nowadays than without. But the Shuberts will give many a playgoer his fill of sentiment.

Acting in the title role, a part created in the U. S. by John Barrymore in 1917, is Dennis (Vagabond) King. Not a few of King's henchmen will be pleased and surprised at his performance in this, his first nonsinging dramatic role in six years. No longer a roaring Villon. Mr. King, in an auburn wig, makes a convincingly demure and sensitive Ibbetson. Jessie Royce Landis is adequate as the kind-hearted Duchess of Towers. Valerie Taylor's Mrs. Deane is astonishingly ill-motivated for such a capable actress.

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