New Plays in Manhattan

Paths of Glory (adapted by Sidney Howard; Arthur Hopkins, producer) may not prevent any more enlistments in the next World War than If This Be Treason. But most people agree that it is a better show.

Adapted from Humphrey Cobb's recent best-selling novel (TIME, June 3) about a reputedly authentic incident on the French front in 1915, it looks at war from a more intimate and shocking angle than Dr. Holmes's dreamy drama. The tale has to do with a gallant regiment of the line which is called upon by a sadistic, medal-hungry general to take a heavily fortified German hill, "The Pimple " after two previous attacks have failed'. The regiment is cut to pieces before it gets through its own wire. The general goes into a psychopathic rage, demands that the survivors be shot for cowardice as examples to the rest of the Army. He finally compromises on one man chosen from each of three companies of the assault battalion.

The horror of Paths of Glory eloquently communicated in the novel and just as ably conveyed from the stage by Adapter Howard and Producer Hopkins surpasses that found in most realistic War literature. In addition to the wasteful slaughter between sides, Paths of Glory reveals a cannibalistic phase of war in which men on the same side want to take each other's lives.

If the dramatic effect of Paths of Glory seems somehow to miss the full impact of What Price Glory? or Journey's End, it is probably due to a slight flaw in the matter of illusion. It is a little distracting to hear men dressed as French soldiers yearn for Paris and their native villages in honest New Yorkese. As the two most prominent of the condemned men, however, a pair of extremely credible performances are turned in by young Actor Myron McCormick, late of the Princeton Triangle Show, and oldtime Actor William Harrigan, commander of the 3rd Battalion of the 307th Infantry, 77th Division A. E. F.

If This Be Treason (by Rev. John Haynes Holmes & Reginald Lawrence; Theatre Guild, producer). On the evening of the inauguration of U. S. President John Gordon, internationally celebrated pacifist, the Japanese Fleet captures Manila. With malice toward none, President Gordon attributes the onslaught to an insulting ultimatum his bellicose predecessor, President Brainard, has sent Japan in the closing hours of his Administration. To the amazement of his Cabinet, to the disgust of a Congress which has apparently been bribed to a man by munitions interests, President Gordon orders every U. S. warship in the Pacific hot-footing home, invites the Japanese Ambassador to lunch next day.

The luncheon never occurs. Congress loses no time declaring war against Japan. Like peace-loving President Grover Cleveland before him. President Gordon thereupon reminds Congress that as Commander-in-Chief of the Army & Navy he alone can order the nation's forces into battle. This he does not propose to do. Instead, he takes ship for Japan for a conference with jingo Premier Yato. In Tokyo, threatened with impeachment, imprisonment, assassination, President Gordon, with the help of a rising tide of Japanese peace sentiment, comes through in great style. The war is called off. He hopes he has established a potent precedent.

Co-author of this fantasy, set at some undetermined date in the nation's future, is one of Manhattan's most publicized preachers. Dr. Holmes has been stumping for terrestrial goodwill for more than a generation, is a moving spirit in such assorted sodalities as the National Association for Advancement of Colored People, All World Gandhi Fellowship War Resisters League. In 1919 he broke with the Unitarians, established his own independent Community Church. While giving Dr. Holmes full marks for nobility of purpose, pragmatic spectators got a strong whiff of the parsonage in If This Be Treason's incorrigible unreality. Show folk credited the play with about as much dramatic savoir-faire as a Sunday School cantata. Even his most devoted parishioners could not find much novelty in Dr. Holmes's and Collaborator Lawrence's dialog. Retorts President Gordon (McKay Morns, the drama's best-looking bald man) to his Secretary of State, who has just called him a fool: "A fool? Perhaps. Perhaps the world needs more fools. The wise men do not seem to have done us much good."

A Touch of Brimstone (by Leonora Kaghan & Anita Philips; John Golden producer) is a genuine three-dimensional portrait of a complete, ruthless egotist. Mark Faber (Roland Young) got into show business simply to make a fortune. To him the theatre is just one more racket he can beat. In the course of beating it he reduces his office staff to hysteria, seduces his virginal leading lady, cuckolds his deserving brother-in-law, demoralizes his amiable wife (Mary Philips). Faber manages to commit all this emotional mayhem with unbounded arrogance, callousness and a certain amount of charm which is conveyed by witty sayings and an engaging incompetence when wrestling with a trick duffel bag. The audience is likely to take Faber's victims at just about Faber's low and careless appraisal, an effect which Authors Kaghan & Philips probably do not intend.

Notable for being the first play to take advantage of New York State's new law permitting legitimate performances on Sunday, A Touch of Brimstone seems somehow irrelevant and dated, a clever theatrical pastiche which may very well be transformed into an acceptable cineman bun.

Remember the Day (by Philo Higley & Philip Dunning; Philip Dunning, producer) is a fragile, Tarkingtonian tale of the pangs of childhood, in which are to be seen the growing or just-grown offspring of some notable stage folk. The cast includes the late William Hodge's daughter Martha, Ed Wynn's son Keenan, Author-Producer Dunning's daughter Virginia, Moffat Johnston's son Peter and John Drew Devereaux (grandson). Mr. Dunning has had a sign placed over the stage door: "Through These Portals Pass the Most Unspoiled Children in the World."

Dewey Roberts (Frank M. Thomas Jr.), a high-strung seventh-grade schoolboy, lives in the Midwest but has a burning love of boats and the sea. He adores his young teacher (Francesca Burning) because she hails from New Bedford, knows what a jibboom is, encourages his enthusiasm. When Dewey finds her kissing the athletic coach, whom he also idolizes, he is heartbroken, persuades his bumbling father (Frank M. Thomas Sr.) to send him to boarding school. Twenty years later Dewey, now an extremely important personage in the shipping industry encounters the teacher, dowdy and myopic, in a Washington hotel, is tempted to take her to dinner, buys her a bunch of violets instead.

Winterset (by Maxwell Anderson: Guthne McClintic, producer). Playwright Anderson makes a practice of reworking old themes. His notion that a nation deserves the Government it gets was put to prose in Both Your Houses which won a Pulitzer Prize in 1933; put to poetry in Valley Forge, which won him a critical A for Effort. In 1928 Playwright Anderson became agitated about the Sacco-Vanzetti case, collaborated with Harold Hickerson on an indignant defense of the accused called Gods of the Lightning. With that celebrated cause still in mind, Mr. Anderson has now fashioned Winterset.

Designer Jo Mielziner scores one game toward an artistic rubber for Winterset the moment the curtain rises. Up from the shadowy dead-end of a Manhattan slum street rises a pylon of Brooklyn Bridge, the span sweeping out of sight high overhead with a sparse twinkle of lights. Beneath this dark serenity Playwright Anderson's people go furtively about their sinister business. With classic disregard for the laws of probability, almost everyone concerned in a 15-year-old payroll robbery for which a celebrated radical was wrongly executed, come together. There is Trock, the consumptive killer who engineered the crime, just out of prison for another misdeed. There is the judge (Richard Bennett), out of his wits with brooding upon the injustice he fears has been done. There is Garth, who saw the robbery committed and might have saved the condemned man had he but spoken. There is the radical's tough and tortured young son Mio (Burgess Meredith), relentlessly set upon clearing his father's name.

Playwright Anderson, whose simple maxim is that "somebody must write verse plays," has clothed his piece intentionally as well as unintentionally in an uneven variety of poetic fabric. Much of the common street speech of his criminals and vagrants is good stout tow-sacking. Much of the overlong excursion into the philosophy of justice, to judge by audience reaction, is tiresome shoddy. But pure chamfered silk, most observers agreed, were the tender, spontaneous love passages between Mio and Miriamne (Margo), Garth's mercurial younger sister, a curious and strangely apposite East Side Juliet.

Critical laurels by the bushel went to tense young Actor Meredith and his partner Margo, whom Filmen Ben Hecht & Charles MacArthur retrieved from a Manhattan cabaret last year for their Crime Without Passion. For his many scenes of undoubted power and beauty, Playwright Anderson was credited with having at least provided a theatrical experience not to be missed by those who take the U. S. Theatre seriously.

Blind Alley (by James Warwick; James R. Ullman, producer) presents a singularly exciting conflict between a disciple of Sigmund Freud, father of psychoanalysis, and a disciple of John Taliaferro Thompson, father of the submachine gun. For three turgid acts a psychiatrist pits his power of suggestion against the guns of a gangster, whose mob has taken refuge in the doctor's home, brutally shot and beaten two of its inmates. The question is, will the doctor succeed in undermining the gangster's morale by conjuring up a base and hidden act in his past or will the gangster riddle the doctor in one of his fits which become increasingly violent as the analysis progresses? Consensus of critics was that if this workmanlike melodrama fails to raise a spectator's hair, he must either have no nerves or no hair.

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