New Plays in Manhattan

Dodsworth (adapted from the Sinclair Lewis novel by Sidney Howard; produced by Max Gordon). Motorcar Manufacturer Sam Dodsworth (Walter Huston) sells his business in bustling little Zenith so that he and his wife Fran (Fay Bainter) can enjoy leisure after 20 years of marriage. They go abroad, where Sam is excited by historic sights, Fran by the attentions of other men. She apologizes for Sam to her glassy continental friends, frankly tells him to go home and let her have her fling.

Back in Zenith he tells his married daughter that Fran ran the house better than she. He returns to Europe to find his wife slipping from the arms of a sleek diplomat into those of an Austrian blue-blood whom, in a flare of temper, she determines to marry. Wandering around Italy waiting for his divorce, Sam finds a woman with whom he is happy (Mrs. Walter Huston). Fran's romance crashes and she calls him back, but Sam gets off the boat in time.

Dodsworth's dramatic impact is cerebral rather than physical. Some of Designer Jo Mielziner's eight crafty settings are repeated to mount 14 scenes on shipboard, in Zenith, Paris, Berlin, Naples, London, Switzerland. Occasional lack of restraint in the direction is well covered by the acting of Fay Bainter and Walter

Huston who, 50 next month, returns to the stage from five busy years in Hollywood.

They Shall Not Die (by John Wexley; produced by the Theatre Guild). Playwright Wexley bases his works (The Last Mile, Steel) on Causes. They Shall Not Die is an angry review of the Scottsboro Case. On the premise that the rape charge against the nine young blackamoors was a frame-up, the play doggedly follows the pattern of the news from the alleged attack aboard a freight train through the first trial to the Supreme Court and on to the second trial. In fact a Manhattan lawyer named Samuel Leibowitz desperately defended the Negroes against a death penalty. In the play a Manhattan lawyer named Nathan G. Rubin (Claude Rains) does the same job, emerging in a final courtroom scene as the hero of the piece. As in real life one of the two girl accusers, Lucy Wells (Ruth Gordon), repudiates her testimony in the first trial, makes a star witness for the defense in the second. Villains of the piece are the police who maltreat Playwright Wexley's Cookesville boys in a brutally realistic first act; the race-prejudiced crowd in the courtroom; two foul-tongued prosecuting attorneys who denounce "Jew money from New York." After listening to Lawyer Rubin's solemn summation, the jury goes off-stage to bring Playwright Wexley's last curtain down with a burst of obscenely scornful laughter. A better playwright than most polemists, Playwright Wexley lost his temper in They Shall Not Die. Yet somehow his journalistic vehemence does not ruin his play. Handsomely mounted by the Theatre Guild and fervently acted by an enormous cast, it succeeds in its purpose to arouse opinions and emotions on a controversial subject.

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