New Plays in Manhattan

In Manhattan last week the theatre celebrated the season's first busy week. Of four new shows, the most pressagented, most discussed, was

Here Today. Good friend of Authoress Dorothy Parker is her publisher, George Oppenheimer (The Viking Press). Deciding to write a play, Publisher Oppenheimer wondered what would happen if a person whose life is devoted to being brilliant were thrown into a houseful of Boston socialites. His answer is highly amusing to almost everyone but the socialites. Mary Hilliard (Ruth Gordon) is bizarre, witty, peripatetic, alcoholic. When they get drunk she and her friend Stanley Dale (Charles D. Brown) go travelling. Once they went to Siam. This time they go to Nassau, where Mary Hilliard's one-time husband, Philip Graves (Donald Macdonald), is trying to persuade fresh, serious Claire Windrew (Sally Bates) to break her engagement and marry him. Hilliard & Dale proceed to the hilarious business of disrupting the household, insulting everybody with epigrams. Particularly do they insult stodgy Mrs. Windrew (Charlotte Granville). Mary Hilliard rifles her liquor cabinet ("White Rock! My favorite drink!"). She picks her perennial roses ("It'll be next year before you know it"). She breaks up her jigsaw puzzle. To make Mrs. Windrew like Philip she invents for him a father who was killed at the aristocratic pastime of foxhunting:

". . . And when that polo ball hit him. . . .';

"I thought you said he was killed hunting. "

"Yes, he was hunting for a polo game."

Further to persuade Mrs. Windrew to accept Philip as a son-in-law Mary Hilliard tells her that her daughter's present fiance has been spending nights in Atlantic City with a Vanities girl. Unfortunately this turns out to be true, not only of the fiance but also of Mrs. Windrew's young son. By this time everybody is on the point of hysterics, including Mary Hilliard, who has suddenly decided she wants Philip for herself.

To offset writing that is frequently jerky, Here Today has the polished direction of George S. Kaufman. To offset the miscasting of Messrs. Macdonald and Brown it has the almost perfect casting of Misses Gordon, Bates, Granville. It is Actress Bates who states the theme of the play:

"You're here today, all of you. ... I want to be here tomorrow, and the day after, and the dav after that. And I want to think about it and worry about it and plan for it. ... Goodbye."

Ballyhoo of 1932. "As clean and wholesome as the magazine!" promises Comedian Bob Hope from an upper box labeled "Complaint Department" a moment before Ballyhoo's many-hued curtain goes up. The revue (written by Ballyhoo magazine's editor, Norman Anthony) keeps its leering promise. Able Comedian Willie Howard struggles home on a street car with the most essential fixture for his bathroom; with Brother Eugene he tries to make a papier-mache cow "give"; on a Columbus Circle soap box he makes a Communist speech: "Rewolt! Our cup of beeterness ees feeled to ze breem! Rewolt!'' There is a nudist sketch; a scene in Cinemactress "Margreta Garbitch's" Hollywood training quarters; a song called "Love, Nuts and Noodles" in which Nina Mae McKinney does what appears to be a nautch dance.

Like its journalistic forbear. Ballyhoo concentrates on kidding advertisements. When Comedian Howard is chief concentrator, it is funny. There are few good tunes (one of them: "While We Have Bromo Seltzer in Our Love Nest") to make Ballyhoo another Band Wagon, which it tries hard to be.

Best Years is a drab little play about a woman who spends the best years of her life taking care of a neurotic mother when she might be enjoying the gayety of a honeymoon in Siberia. So strong is the hold of Mrs. Davis (Jean Adair) on her daughter Cora (Katherine Alexander) that Fred Barton (Harvey Stephens) has to do his courting under her watchful eye. When Cora starts for a dance with him Mrs. Davis collapses in the footlights. During the entire third act Mrs. Davis lies unconscious on a sofa in full view of the audience while other members of the household leave Cora to care for her. When the curtain goes down Mrs. Davis is dead. Playwright Raymond Van Sickle evidently felt very strongly that mothers are the curse of small-town life. Manhattan playgoers, for most of whom the mother problem has been superseded by the housing problem, will probably feel no less strongly concerning plays about them.

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