New Plays in Manhattan

Battleship Gertie (by Frederick Hazlitt Brennan; Courtney Burr, producer). Last season Producer Burr made a lot of money out of a naval farce called Sailor, Beware! (TIME, Oct. 9, 1933.) Battleship Gertie was supposed to be smuttier and funnier than Sailor, Beware! It is not.

Laburnum Grove (by John Boynton Priestley; Gilbert Miller & Milton Shubert, producers). When cheerful Novelist Priestley discovered that all was right with the world--or soon would be--he began to make a small fortune out of his books (The Good Companions; English Journey). He is likely to make another fortune from the stage on the strength of his discovery that a playwright can get by with a few unpretentious tricks and a couple of good characters. For the characters of Bernard Baxley and George Radfern in Laburnum Grove, Playwright Priestley may be forgiven almost any of his dramatic shortcomings. Bernard Baxley (Melville Cooper), late of Singapore ("a man's life!''), has hooded eyes, a wolfish gait, greying hair and a small paunch. Constantly engaged in a verbal scrimmage with his dowdy wife, he eats bananas all day long, wears dirty golf clothes and is a sponger by habit. Mr. Baxley is known as "The Rajah" to his brother-in-law, Mr. Radfern (Edmund Gwenn). John Bull himself, Radfern has a face like the man in the moon, a way of smacking his lips over ham and cheese, an air of honest living. An established householder in Laburnum Grove, Shooters Green, a North London suburb, George Radfern seems as respectable a citizen as George V until he blandly informs the family circle that for years he has been carrying on a private system of inflation with homemade money. First result of this announcement is to rid the home of the trifling in-laws and another pompadoured loafer who has been hanging around Radfern's daughter and trying to borrow money from her father to go into the second-hand automobile business. What happens thereafter is between Scotland Yard and George Radfern, Playwright Priestley and his audience. As Radfern, Edmund Gwenn, oldtime British trouper who had not been in the U. S. for 13 years, turns in a magnificent performance. He received the biggest armful of critical laurels given any British male theatrical visitor since Charles Laughton (TIME, Oct. 12, 1931).

Fly Away Home (by Dorothy Bennett & Irving White; Theron Bamberger, producer). There are eight adolescents in Fly Away Home and a trio of adults who also act pretty childishly. Of these oldsters the most amusing is Thomas Mitchell, cast as a sober-sided father whose divorced wife found him too serious. He has not seen his children for years until he returns to the family's summer home to witness his wife's remarriage to a visionary professor.

As the old saw has it, the Masters children are not bad children; they are just thoughtless when it comes to paying their elders respect or attention. Portly Actor Mitchell has his hands full with them, trying to get them out of scrapes, listening to their shocking biological revelations, accepting their low regard for his intellect. The surprising thing about Fly Away Home is that none of these juvenile antics is anything but delightful, wholesome fun. Needless to say, it is the children who straighten out the adult triangle in the end.

Point Valaine (by Noel Coward; John C. Wilson, producer). The big moment in this play is when Alfred Lunt spits into Lynn Fontanne's face. This affront so horrified most Manhattan critics that they conscientiously began to add up Point Valaine's dramatic worth to see if such a gross humiliation to popular Actress Fontanne was justified. Consensus was that it was not. Consequently, Point Valaine came in for such comment as "weirdly amateurish piece of work," "leaves you cold," "never seems either very interesting or at all important." Noel Coward's boast is that he whips off his dramas at odd moments during his perpetual travels. It would not be surprising to learn that he composed Point Valaine during a railway journey between New York and Philadelphia. As dramaturgy it is definitely on the lean side, somewhat underdone. But Noel Coward is one of the few playwrights who never bores an audience. Point Valaine, therefore, may not be important, but neither is it uninteresting. It concerns a middle-aged sensualist (Lynn Fontanne) who has for years given herself to the wild-eyed animal (Alfred Lunt) who serves as headwaiter of the hotel she runs in the British West Indies. Brought to a crisis when the proprietress falls tragically in love with a convalescent young aviator, the story culminates with Actor Lunt's expectoration scene, after which he stabs his wrists, lets out a few pathetic whinnies and jumps into the sea to be devoured by sharks.

The slow, insidious, stealthy development of his sultry anecdote's main thread has given Playwright Coward time to introduce a round dozen guests who patter about the veranda of the hotel at Point Valaine distributing comic relief. Silly, petty, completely Cowardian, these guests serve as moving targets for the malicious wit of a visiting novelist named Mortimer Quinn. Impersonated by that perennial devil's advocate of the theatre, Osgood Perkins, Quinn knows what everybody else is going to do before they do it, seems to have all the amusing lines to say and, as much to the surprise of the author as anyone else, walks away with the show.

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