New Plays in Manhattan

Brain Sweat (by John Charles Brownell; produced by James Montgomery & Henry R. Stern). The season's most disagreeable title cloaks one of the few straight Negro comedies ever produced on Broadway. Inoffensive and in spots disarmingly merry. Brain Sweat is concerned with Henry Washington's "projeck." Henry (fat, benign Billy Higgins, nightclub comedian) has not done a lick of work in two years. While his wife and son support him, he has been content to wear a fine patina on the seat of his rocking chair and cogitate means of making some easy money. "Brain sweatin','' explains Henry, "is de wus' kind of sweatin'."

As the comic trials of Henry's long-suffering wife (able Rose McClendon of Porgy) increase, as Henry's sister-in-law becomes increasingly acidic on the subject of Henry's laziness, not a few spectators may be reminded of those unpretentious little Irish genre comedies of the Abbey Players. The parallelism goes further in the wake scene, after Henry is supposed to have gone off despondently and drowned himself. Needless to say, Henry reappears, alive and happy in a store-bought suit and brown derby, his "projeck" a success. First-week audiences seemed immensely pleased when Henry outwitted his onetime white employer, sold for $10,000 an option on some land which had only cost him $1,000. Magniloquently, Henry gives his patient wife a thousand, his gambling brother-in-law another thousand, his son still another (no one in the cast had seemed fazed when it was announced that his son's little fiancee was pregnant). "And Henry," the darktown financier addresses himself, "hyeah's seven thousan' fo you."

Moor Born (by Dan Totheroh; George Bushar & John Tuerk, producers). The success of Katharine Cornell in The Barretts of Wimpole Street encouraged at least two other playwrights to turn their hands to theatrical biographies of 19th Century lady authors. A year ago there was talk of producing in the U. S. Clemence Dane's Wild Decembers, a study of the Bronte's acclaimed in London. This possibility becomes more remote now that Playwright Totheroh (Distant Drums) has gotten his own story of the three weird sisters of Haworth on the boards. There would be no use selecting the same family twice to demonstrate the well-proven thesis that the library, not the theatre, is the proper setting for biographical research.

The ladies chosen to impersonate the Sisters Bronte in Mr. Totheroh's script are considerably more personable than their austere, schoolmarmish originals. Edith Barrett (Mrs. Moonlight), makes a birdlike Anne, apologetically penning her "little things . . . just little things." Junoesque Helen Gahagan is somewhat more credible as the witchlike Emily, properly "moor born" and as skittery as -a woodcock. Sensitive Frances Starr at least gets one leg over her interpretation of ambitious, aging Charlotte. Most disappointing clement in a generally disappointing play is Glenn Anders' Branwell. Mr. Anders (Strange Interlude, Another Language), not content with reeling about the stage in order to account for the talented Bronte son's propensity for alcohol and opium, has also chosen to give the tainted youth the accents and attitudes of a homosexual. Only once does Playwright Totheroh depart from the standard Bronte facts. In that instance he has taken the liberty of going incredibly wide of the mark. Dying Emily arranges to credit her Wuthering Heights to dead, unsung Branwell, a plan, according to Mr. Totheroh, frustrated by practical Charlotte. This bit of gratuitous melodrama is equalled in its bogusness only by the fitful wind machine which puffs and moans offstage in a thankless effort to dramatize the gusty, heathered barren on which three gifted Yorkshire women broke their hearts nearly a hundred years ago.

The House of Remsen (by Nicholas Soussanin, William J. Perlman and Marie Baumer; produced by Nicholas Soussanin) is a gloomy, dogged, occasionally impressive summation of the horrors of uncertain paternity. Described by friends as a successful businessman with fine qualities. Remsen (James Kirkwood) is fond of his small son Clyde and daughter Vivianne, adores his comely wife Laura (Francesca Bruning). From behind a curtain Remsen overhears a onetime lover try in vain to persuade Laura to resume their liaison. In an automobile crash Laura is killed, the lover badly hurt. On finding a letter from which he learns that one of the children is not his, Remsen speeds to the hospital, tells the injured man he is dying, curses when the muttered answer to his question is "Clyde." Thereafter Vivienne (Francesca Bruning) is showered with affection while Clyde, growing up tremulously under Remsen's hating eye and stern hand, is banished to boarding school. Lonely at college, Clyde falls in with a flip young hussy who under legal age and finding herself pregnant, threatens to bring criminal charges unless Remsen pays. Remsen coldly refuses, lets the boy stand trial. Just as Clyde is acquitted, Laura's old lover, who has spent the years since his recovery in Europe, returns to admit that Vivienne is his child, that he lied to save her from harsh treatment.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.