New Plays in Manhattan

Men Must Fight (by Reginald Lawrence & S. K. Lauren; Joseph P. Bickerton Jr., producer) is an idea play. The idea is that if people really did not want wars there would not be any.

It is the year 1940. The U. S. is about to begin hostilities with a federation of South American States. Secretary of State Edwin Seward (claiming no relationship with Lincoln's Secretary of State) has signed the declaration. His wife and son are dead against Seward's folly. His son's chauvinistic sweetheart is all for it. Nevertheless, the younger Seward decides to use the family name and prestige to promote pacifism, declaring, amid a fluttering of applause from the audience, "If all the young men refuse to fight, there will be no more war." It is then that he hears the bad news. He is not a Seward at all. His mother had a lover in 1915 who died in the air service. So the boy gets married and puts on a uniform because--well, because everyone else is playing the game and he is expected to. The curtain falls as a squadron of airplanes drone.

Men Must Fight does not attempt to solve the insoluble. In its quiet, ironic way it is stirring. The able cast contains Erin O'Brien-Moore as the sweetheart. Douglass Montgomery as the son, Alma Kruger as caustic old Grandmother Seward.

Criminal At Large (by Edgar Wallace; Guthrie McClintic, producer). In the latest posthumous melodrama of prolific Edgar Wallace to reach this country are: an ancient English family seat where two murders have been committed; an imperious lady (Alexandra Carlisle) who goes about praising her ancestors and trying to hide evidence; her amiable son (Emlyn Williams), her frightened niece (Katherine Wilson); two plug-ugly footmen, one romantic, one comic and one effective police officer. Less vigilant spectators will be in anxious seats until Actor Williams begins to smile late in Act III. The cast of this loosely pasted thriller snoop, scream, poke their hands through false panels in professional manner. Actor Williams is particularly shrewd with his part. So is Actress Carlisle, who still commands the forensic gift with which she seconded the vice-presidential nomination of Calvin Coolidge in 1920.

The Good Earth (by Pearl Sydenstricker Buck, Owen & Donald Davis; Theatre Guild, producer). Readers of Mrs. Buck's homely Pulitzer Prizewinning melodrama of Chinese life, now in its 23rd edition, will find the Guild's adaptation, which rang up the curtain on its 15th season, a brief paraphrase of the novel. Wang Lung, the hardy farmer, as greedy for more land as the soil is greedy for sun and rain, does not die at the conclusion as he does in the book. And he has not three sons given him by OLan, the big-boned, but one. It is OLan, with a hard knot in her womb from brutal child-bearing and brutal work, whose death climaxes with dignity this conscientious play.

Even when its stately Oriental pace tires, which it does particularly in the beginning of Act III, Actress Alia Nazimova as OLan commands respectful attention. It is her play. She it is who makes Wang Lung (Claude Rains) buy his first bit of land. Although Wang grows rich and soft as she grows sick and old, it is her death which brings Wang back to the good earth of his and her fore fathers.

It goes without saying that the Guild has mounted its production with brilliance, employing Lee Simonson to do simple and notably effective scenery. Making plays out of novels, however, is risky business. Playgoers will probably find The Good Earth long on austerity, short on entertainment.

I Loved You Wednesday (by Molly Ricardel & William DuBois; Crosby Gaige, producer). Victoria Meredith (Frances Fuller of The Animal Kingdom) and Randall Williams (Humphrey Bogart) are lovers. They part after a winter in Paris when his rich wife (Rose Hobart) arrives with big plans for him. Five years later they meet in Manhattan. Victoria has become a famed dancer. Randall has made money as an architect, acquired, according to his wife, the reputation of being "a sybarite with the morals of a tomcat." Follows a long, spurious sequence with everybody saying very hard, wise things to everybody else in the pat, brittle, wisecracking manner used so facilely by Philip Barry and so embarrassingly by his followers. You do not have to be supersensitive to cringe at the scene where the wife and ex-mistress meet in the speakeasy, both very gallant and willing to thrash out their mutual problem drink-for-drink.

The tasteful setting, capable direction and talented impersonations of I Loved You Wednesday seem considerably more important than the ultimate decision which the dancer is to make: whether to go back to Paris with the tomcat or go to Java with another man.

Rendezvous (by Barton MacLane; Arthur Hopkins, producer) begins in "A Dugout. Somewhere In France." Private Oakley (Playwright MacLane), a sturdy character who takes to bloodshed like a cat to mice, is called upon to shoot down an officer who has shot his friend. Thereafter the play progresses from one burst of gunfire to another.

Back in civilian life, Private Oakley and some of his Wartime companions, still excited by their martial experiences, organize a bootlegging business along military lines. Their warehouse is built like a fort, they sleep in barracks, military discipline prevails. The character of an Oakley gangster is one part Legs Diamond, one part Boy Scout. The Oakley crowd is righteously at war with a very unAmerican competing outfit headed by one Tony Rossalino. This campaign culminates in a six-corpse shooting scrape during which Rossalino's girl helps the Oakleys. Private Oakley is sent to the death house with Rossalino's girl, marries her just before going to the electric chair. Critics wondered what smart Producer Hopkins could have been thinking about when he fostered this silly melodrama.

Black Sheep (written & produced by Elmer Rice [Reizenstein]). Immediately after Producer Hopkins had unpleasantly surprised theatregoers with his inept Rendezvous, along came Playwright Rice with the second major disappointment of the play week. The author of Pulitzer Prize-winning Street Scene foisted on his following a scrappy bit of nonsense dealing with a short-story writer who left his respectable home to wander over the world. When he returned it was with considerable literary kudos and a mistress. He settled into his family's comfortable life with amazing ease, took up golf, curried favor with the Press, jacked up his prices, tried to kiss the maid, seduced his brother's fiancee, married a widow. Having raised merry Ned in general, he was rescued by his girl just in time for Art, whisked off to Rio de Janeiro. Mr. Rice withdrew his piece after four performances.

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