New Plays in Manhattan

Crime Marches On (by Bertrand Robinson & Maxwell Hawkins; Busbar & Tuerk, producers) provides the first Broadway stellar role for Mary, pretty 18-year-old daughter of the late Will Rogers. It also chronicles the unearthly adventures of a rustic poet from Middle

Tennessee who unexpectedly wins a Pulitzer Prize, is hauled off to Manhattan to versify on a radio program for a soap manufacturer whose competitor is about to offer a criminal "March of TIME" on the air. The Pulitzer Prizeman throws his employer out a window of the Empire State Building, hangs a radio announcer, wakes up. Reviewers compared Crime Marches On with The Tavern, produced by George M. Cohan in 1920, which did not make any sense either.

Mulatto (by Langston Hughes; Martin Jones, producer).

My old man's a white old man

And my old woman's black. . . .

My old man died in a fine big house.

My ma died in a shack.

I wonder where I'm gonna die

Being neither white nor black.

So wrote black Langston Hughes on the first page of his first volume of poetry (The Weary Blues, 1926). Last week the same theme ran through Poet Hughes's first play. Mulatto. In the South the dominant white race demands that when a Negro takes a white woman he must pay instantly with his life. On the other hand when a white man takes a Negro woman, the tragedy is often delayed for years. Mulatto deals with the slower tragedy.

Colonel Thomas Norwood (Stuart Beebe) is a white planter who occasionally passes a night with his black housekeeper, Cora Lewis (Rose McClenndon). Playwright Hughes lays claim to serious consideration by his perceptive presentation of Norwood and the Negroes on his place. No Simon Legree, the wealthy widower seems to treat his dusky employes fairly, is downright generous with Cora and her family. In turn, the Negroes give Norwood that queerly affectionate and somewhat frightened obedience expected and received by Southern whites. Without nosing it as a universal occurrence, Playwright Hughes reveals one dramatic consequence of this interracial situation in its full frightfulness. Accepted neither by blacks nor whites, an outcast of both races, Robert, mulatto son of Cora and Norwood runs wild in desperation, chokes his father to death, shoots himself in his mother's bedroom before the lynchers can reach him.

Strip Girl (by Henry Rosendahl; L. Lawrence Weber, producer) contains some of the toughest talk heard on the Broadway stage this season, a trace of burlesque atmosphere, a strip queen (Mayo, Methot) who takes pride in her work, a loose, undigested story in 23 scenes, practically nothing else.

Substitute for Murder (by William Jourdan Rapp & Leonards Bercovici; William Harris Jr., producer) will probably win no championships even in the featherweight division. Originally titled Oedipus Wrecks, it concerns a pair of mischievously psychopathic youngsters who resent the appreance of a prospective stepfather, fill him full of liquor, send him up as a stowaway on an endurance flight. But the stowaway comes down, thus definitely deflating the younsters' scheme and, incidentally, Substitute for Murder.

Eden End (by John Boynton Priestley; Milton Shubert, producer). Wrote Author-Playwright Priestley (The Good Companions, Laburnum Grove) in the New York Times three weeks before his lastest play opened in Manhattan: " I should like to see more English plays here, more American plays in London... There will be disappointments, of course... The average New Yorker does not go to the theatre in exactly the same state of mind as the average London citizen. The former has a weakness for plays that tighten and then jangle his nerves. Our London audiences like to be gently moved, to melt into the rose-tinted twilight of the Haymarket or Wyndham's, because of some fairy-tale nonsense." Thus putting his finger on the reason many an English play fails in New York, British Playwright Priestley proceeded to bring forth a typical one, about a shopworn actress who returns to her old home. Nervous New Yorkers found it too gentle, too rose-tinted for their taste.

Good Men and True (by Brian Marlow & Frank Merlin; Mr. Merlin, producer) intrudes into a jury room after a judge has handed over a murder case to five women and seven men, the defendant's peers. Jury duty usually has a few moments of genuine excitement but many more of tedium. So has Good Men and True.

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