New Plays in Manhattan

Gentlewoman (by John Howard Lawson; Group Theatre, producer). The heroine (Stella Adler) of this play is a soft Park Avenue widow who announces, with unjustified assurance: "My head is full of epigrams and my heart is full of tears." The hero (Lloyd Nolan), a communistic Casanova, replies, "You are smeared with perfume and emotion." As might be anticipated, their alliance is not lasting. At the end of the play he is headed for Iowa City, plotting to become a nuisance to the government. She, unmarried still, is planning an accouchement. She hopes her child will forget the informality of its origin when it sees the spectacle of "burning cities . . . marching armies ... a funeral procession towards a red horizon." Of the four plays that opened in Manhattan last week, Playwright Lawson (Processional, Success Story) wrote two. He received congratulations only on his industry. The opening of The Pure in Heart amounted to a wink, for it closed after seven performances. Whatever Playwright Lawson had in mind when he wrote Gentlewoman is lost, like his heroine, in words, beautiful but superfluous. Its most interesting character is a lewd wench (Claudia Morgan) who seduces the hero in the second act and gives the heroine a tart outline of a happy future: "I'll end in a Westchester cottage and torture my husband by being frank about my past."

The Shatter'd Lamp (by Leslie Reade; produced by Hyman Adler). One thing which Germany has exported in quantity since Jan. 30, 1933 is dramatic material. Kultur, first anti-Nazi play to appear in Manhattan, was an hysterical shambles. Birthright, the second, was little better. Easily best so far is The Shatter'd Lamp, written in England and whisked off the London stage by the censor after one performance. Races, the Theatre Guild's investigation of the same topic, was last week in rehearsal.

The Shatter'd Lamp is helped through some awkward soliloquies by intelligent performances, notably the hollow-eyed acting of Effie Shannon. She plays the Jewish wife of mild, aryan, pacifist Professor Opal (Guy Bates Post) who teaches in a Bavarian university. Their son Karl (Owen Davis Jr.) and his fiancee are admirers of Adolf Hitler. But when Karl's bigwig Storm Trooper friend Johannes von Rentzau learns that his mother is Jewish, a Nazi blight falls on the house. Professor Opal loses his job, bank account, friends; Karl his Storm Troop membership and fiancee. Frau Opal shoots herself dead. Von Rentzau marches in with a handful of troopers to inform the professor that because he had a son killed in the War, the high command has reinstated him at the university. Bearing his wife's body onstage, Professor Opal is in the midst of a terrific denunciation when a bullet silences him forever.

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