New Plays in Manhattan

Judgment Day (written and produced by Elmer Rice). For his material for this play Mr. Rice made no bones about going to the judicial aftermath of the fire that mysteriously gutted Berlin's Reichstag Building in February 1933. Principal figures in that fantastic trial were Defendant Marinus van der Lubbe, a young Dutchman who seemed to be in a drugged stupor; Defendant George Dimitroff, a fiery, grim-lipped Bulgarian who mocked the proceedings, badgered the prosecution; gaudy, bull-necked Prussian Premier Hermann Wilhelm Goering, who, taunted by Dimitroff, flew into a trembling, sweating fury, shrieked: "I am not afraid of you, you rascal! You have reason to fear that I'll catch you when you're out of prison! You dirty rascal! You dirty rascal" (TIME, Nov. 13).

Scene of Judgment Day is a courtroom in "a capital of Southeastern Europe." Accused of attempting the life of the Dictator-Minister-President, three alleged members of the People's Party are brought before the High Court. One is a young German who sits soddenly with hanging head, occasionally mumbling nonsense. "Has he been drugged?" one of the judges asks. Another is an uncowed, sharp-tongued individual named George Khitov (Walter Greaza), who denounces the accusation as a frame-up, the witnesses as tools of the National Party. When the beefy, ranting Minister of Culture & Enlightenment (Romaine Callender) appears in a uniform ablaze with gold braid and epaulets, he is driven to apoplectic frenzy by Khitov's thrusts: "If this court does not deal with you, you scoundrel," he bellows, "I'll deal with you myself!"

In Germany, Defendant van der Lubbe was beheaded, the others acquitted. In Judgment Day, all but one of the judges are about to be bullied into a blanket verdict of guilty when the Dictator (House Jameson) appears, encounters a sudden revolt, is shot dead. Even more boisterous and declamatory than Pulitzer Prize-winner Rice's We, the People, this sharply written melodrama suffers from one defect : real news events, when literally re-created in the theatre, tend to sound like burlesques.

Lady Jane (by H. M. Harwood; Arch Selwyn, Harold B. Franklin, Arthur Hopkins, producers). Playwright Harwood's stock-in-trade is his oblique and theatrical view of marital infidelity. In Lady Jane his premise seems to be that a woman may be unfaithful to her husband without any unhappiness or demoralization to the three people involved, provided one does not know about it.

Lady Jane Kingdom (Frances Starr) runs her gardens, chickens and doddering professorial husband satisfactorily, but soon after the curtain rises begins to have trouble with her children. Her daughter Liza (Lila Lee, oldtime cinemactress trying for a legitimate comeback) is a bobbed-haired nymphomaniac consorting with a London gossip writer who carries cocaine and an automatic. And Daughter-in-law Sybil (Frieda Inescort) thinks she is understood only by a vain popular novelist. Shrewd Lady Jane puts Sybil and the novelist in adjoining bedrooms outside which a nightingale is singing. As Lady Jane expected, they take advantage of propinquity. And as she also expected, flighty Sybil is sorely disappointed that her spiritual affinity has carnal appetites. To send Sybil back to her husband with a clear conscience and a shut mouth, to shock Liza into decent behavior, Lady Jane then tells her girls that for years she has been the mistress of a man who has just been made Viceroy of India. That seems to settle everything.

The Bride of Torozko (by Otto Indig; Gilbert Miller and Herman Shumlin, producers). When the recorder of Torozko, Rumania, looks up the birth credentials of the village belle, he finds that she is not, as she thinks, the daughter of Catholic peasants but a Jewish foundling. Klari (Jean Arthur) promptly breaks her engagement to the village tosspot, goes to live with a kindly old Hebrew publican (Sam Jaffe), learns to like the Talmud. The town recorder looks into the matter further and discovers that Klari is neither Jew nor Catholic but a Protestant foundling. She shuts the Talmud and reopens her engagement.

The amiable racial controversies in The Bride of Torozko are decorated by observations like the publican's: "Everyone should be a Jew for four weeks. As for me, two weeks would be enough." It contains its complement of minor characters: a simpleton, a schoolmaster. Klari's girlfriend. If it bad been transplanted, like Sidney Howard's The Late Christopher Bean, instead of merely translated, by Ruth Langner, its merits as a play might have been more apparent.

When she attended a Manhattan high school, Jean Arthur's ambition was to become a tight-rope walker. She got a job as a photographer's model. When a Fox scout saw her picture he arranged a screen test, then a contract. At 15, Jean Arthur went to Hollywood, acted in cinema for nine years, made her stage debut in 1932 as a Hungarian peasant in. Foreign Affairs. Since then she has appeared in The Curtain Rises, Virtuous Husbands, The Man Who Reclaimed His Head.

She is 5 ft. 2 in. tall, fond of gardening and antique furniture, a resident of Greenwich Village. She dresses in tweeds, has two dogs and five alley cats, uses a dark stain to give her hair its golden appearance in her current role. Her husband, Frank J. Ross Jr., is a building contractor. Having reversed the procedure with which most handsome young actresses start their careers, she will presently return to Hollywood to make a picture for Columbia.

Tight Britches (by John Taintor Foote and Hubert Hayes; Laurence Rivers, Inc., producer) pries into the sexual problems of a handsome young North Carolina mountaineer (Shepperd Strudwick) whom neither God nor the girls can let alone. Off and on he turns down the prettiest wench (Joanna Roos) and the richest heiress in the hills (Virginia Milne) and reiterates his call to preach the Word. Finally the strumpet's father takes up his squirrel rifle and puts a bullet through the novice preacher's heart. Sighs the boy's aunt: "You was too big for your britches." Of such ancient and sure-fire material, the authors have made a puttering first act, a stirring second and third.

Tight Britches suffers from an attempt to make it a second Tobacco Road, a sociological study of the hardy and poverty-ridden Anglo-Saxons of North Carolina's Great Smoky Mountain country. So esoteric is the idiom that a glossary is included with the program. "Swivvetty" means nervous; "upscuddle," quarrel; "hippin," diaper; "gaum," disorder; "furriner," any outsider.

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