New Play in Manhattan

Sweet Aloes (by Joyce Carey; Lee Ephraim, producer) is a good commercial mixture of pseudo-science and sob-stuff calculated to provide a lush, sentimental background suitable to the fragile beauty of British Actress Evelyn Laye, unseen on Broadway since her impersonation of another lady of sorrows in Noel Coward's Bitter Sweet. However, the play scarcely deserves the full ire of Walter Winchell, the New York Mirror's columnist-critic, who commented: "Sweet Aloesy."

At the conclusion of a summer's romantic misbehavior on the Bay of Naples, Belinda Warren (Miss Laye) has returned to the dank residence of her frosty aunt. The inescapable laws of biology soon com plicate Belinda's problem. She is to have a baby. Unhappily, the baby's illegitimate father is already married to a childless invalid. The baby's illegitimate grandfather rationally proposes that the little newcomer be smuggled into his son's home, passed off as his son's legal heir.

When a British heroine of Belinda Warren's type gets into trouble, she usually has, the choice of being sent either to Paris or New York. Belinda goes to New York. There she meets and is married to one of those rich, handsome but not altogether idle lawyers (this one is John Litel) who are so handy to dramas like Sweet Aloes. But Belinda is still miserable. She longs for her baby. She tortures herself with sweet memories of the Bay of Naples and bitter forebodings about her child's wellbeing. At this point an old family friend, a practical psychologist, learns that Belinda's former lover and his wife are in town. Ruthlessly, he brings the three together. This final implausibility is supposed to ease Belinda's mind and makes everything all right. It also makes a show which should provide female matinee audiences with agreeable thrills and sniffles.

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