Shakespeare in Ogunquit

When she retired from the stage in 1918, Maude Adams vowed never to act again. She has broken her vow twice: once in 1931, when she toured in The Merchant of Venice; again last winter when she performed on the radio for Pond's Cold Cream. Last week, Maude Adams, now 62, seemed closer than ever to a real return to the Manhattan theatre where she was No. 1 actress (Peter Pan, Little Minister) in the decade before the War. She opened at Ogunquit, Maine, in Twelfth Night.

Like last week's other revivals (see cols. 2 & 3), Miss Adams' had its peculiarities. She herself performed not as Viola but in the minor part of Maria. The play was equipped with a prolog and epilog suggested by Miss Adams and written by old-time Dramacritic Walter Prichard Eaton, which attempted to give Twelfth Night the flavor of a play within a play. In the prolog, while the players bargained with an innkeeper and set up their props, supernumeraries, representing members of a 17th Century audience at a country theatre "try-out," gathered in the stage boxes. In six weeks of rehearsals so secret that few Ogunquit villagers knew she was in town, Miss Adams had cut Shakespeare's five acts to two.

In the orchestra seats of Ogunquit's little playhouse a capacity audience of 500, including onetime Governor Alvan T. Fuller of Massachusetts and Producer A. H. Woods, gave Miss Adams a five-minute ovation when she appeared, another when the play ended. Miss Adams' plans for Twelfth Night were a week in Ogunquit, followed by a two month tour of New England summer theatres. If she and the play are as well received as they were last week she may take it to Manhattan in October, thus annihilating her 1918 vow.

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