New Plays in Manhattan

Stage Door (by George S. Kaufman & Edna Ferber; Sam H. Harris, producer). Having thoroughly extolled the pride and excitement of theatrical life when he and Edna Ferber wrote The Royal Family (1927), having thoroughly deflated the parvenu pretense of Hollywood when he and Moss Hart wrote Once in a Lifetime (1930), George Kaufman, collaborating with Miss Ferber again, is compelled to cover some fairly old ground in a fairly old way when he again fights the battle of the drama v. the cinema in Stage Door.

When Terry (Margaret Sullavan), the bravest little unemployed ingenue living at the shabby Foot-Lights Club, says that she would not go to Hollywood and have her art put up in a can like soup even for an ermine swimming pool, she is not bringing any fresh arguments to bear on the long-mooted question of superiority be tween stage and screen. And when her radical, playwriting friend (Richard Kendrick), having decided after a Broad way success to go West and write for and not about the masses, tells Terry that the theatre is an obsolete art form which is not equipped to keep its devotees' bodies or spirits alive, he has only echoed the standard rebuttal of an old debate.

Actress Sullavan, whose few metropolitan stage parts disclosed her as a young lady with a strained voice and a forced, girlish delivery, has not changed much in the three years she has been in Hollywood.

Her impersonation of a girl who at the last moment replaces a famed screen star, who for publicity purposes has condescended to return to show business for one dramatic appearance, suggests a parallel be tween art and life that is likely to confuse most spectators.

The drawbacks, however, need not seriously impede theatregoers looking for laughs. In Stage Door, as in any Kaufman-directed show, there is something funny going on most of the time, whether it be the saturnine reflections of a girl whose 15-year-old sister is said to be as innocent as Mata Hari, or an all too realistic Times Square bedroom scene in which Terry and her roommate shout good night to each other, blindfold themselves and attempt to go to sleep amid a roaring, flashing hell of metropolitan night life. Swing Your Lady (by Kenyon Nicholson & Charles Robinson; Milton Shubert, producer). In the training quarters of a large Greek wrestler named Joe Skopapoulos (John Alexander), a horseshoe is found hidden under the Skopapoulos pillow. "What's he keeping that for?" someone asks. "I don't know," says his small manager (Joe Laurie Jr.) wearily, "maybe he's saving up for a horse." The horseshoe later turns out to be an amatory memento from a huge lady blacksmith named Sadie (Hope Emerson).

In Swing Your Lady, the authors of Sailor, Beware! have gone about as far inland as they possibly could-to Joplin, Mo.--for a locale. When Joe Skopapoulos is instructed to put out his tongue for medical inspection, it is also necessary to instruct him to retract it when the examination is over. His entourage can converse without letting him understand what they say by spelling crucial words. When they want him to be amused, they invite him to "sit down and read the pictures." Broke and stranded, Joe's manager signs him to wrestle Sadie. Joe. who likes women close to his own weight, falls in love with her, enjoys her favors, refuses to go through with the match.

The problem of finding someone to pit against Joe is solved when Noah, the gigantic, bearded father of one of Sadie's three informal children, takes umbrage at the usurper, comes down the mountain with his fowling piece. After a careful rehearsal of grunts, groans, screams and floor-poundings, the two are shown wrestling in the arena. Pep talk before the bout: "Never forget, boys, that a good wrestler is always a good performer."

Iron Men (by Francis Gallagher; Norman Bel Geddes, producer) presents a scene never before approximated for verisimilitude in the theatre-the uppermost steel skeleton of a skyscraper under construction. Not content with that, Designer-Producer Bel Geddes has put his scene into operation. A giant crane looming up into the flies brings up six or seven big I-beams which are bolted into place before the eyes of the audience. In robust defiance of the "pusher" (man with the blueprints), four steelworkers ride on the ball attached to the crane-hook. Only flaws in this extraordinary feat of artistic naturalism are that when the beams (actually wood) strike something they emit a hollow thump instead of a ringing clank, and that when the inevitable victim falls from the crane to his death, a ludicrous dummy is seen tumbling against the backdrop.

A generation ago David Belasco initiated a phase of naturalism on the U. S. stage with real flowers, water faucets from which water ran, coffee that steamed and smelled. Of late, the Krasnaya Presnaya Theatre in Moscow, part of whose repertory is a play in which the audience finds itself in the midst of a pitched battle, has taken the lead in holding the theatrical mirror up to life. From whatever source Mr. Bel Geddes gets his inspiration for such supernaturalistic productions as he designed for Dead End and Iron Men, he has not been over-lucky in finding good plays to go with them.

Iron Men's inconsequential and unconvincing story concerns a crack squad of "connectors," the men who bolt structural beams in place to be followed by the "gunners'' who rivet them. Andy, the arrogant and prideful leader of the gang, becomes angry when one of his men, Nils, announces that he is going to quit because his wife is afraid he will fall. Another man does fall, whereupon his co-workers traditionally knock off for the day, start drinking in their favorite barroom. When Nils refuses to change his mind. Andy drunkenly concocts a ruse by which he in duces Nils to believe that his good wife is a prostitute. Nils kills himself and his wife (off stage) and Andy loses his job and goes crazy. There are times when this flimsy tale comes to a dead stop and the workmen loll about on their crags ex changing rowdy talk and banter, much like the urchins of Dead End grown older and transported 63 floors up. "What's the purtiest thing in the world?" asks Andy.

"A nekkid woman," someone ventures.

"Naw!" sneers Andy. "It's one of these here buildings before they come along and cover up the steel with a lot of crap." The role of Andy is capably played by William Haade, 33, who before his appearance in Iron Men never set foot on a stage in his life. Mr. Kaade is a crack steelworker. Boss of his gang, he put up steel on Manhattan's Barbizon-Plaza and Pierre Hotels, Farmer's Loan & Trust Co., and Bank of Manhattan buildings. River side Church, Lincoln Hospital. He is a member of the International Association of Bridge, Structural & Ornamental Iron Workers, Local No. 40. He and his German wife have two young sons. He likes to talk about steelwork, his sons, his dog. He is boisterous, friendly, stubborn, generous. In Iron Men he shinnies up a vertical girder, using only his hands and his knees. During rehearsals he put in two or three-days' work on Fordham Hospital's new morgue building to keep his hand in.

Afraid that he would be joshed when he went back to steelwork, Haade insisted that there be three other steelworkers in the play with him. They find the stage dull, dislike the night work. Mr. Geddes would like to keep Haade in the theatre and five cinema companies last week offered him screen tests, which he has not accepted. Unwilling, however, to ruin a perfectly good steelworker. Mr. Geddes is letting his protege choose his own course.

Ten Million Ghosts (by Sidney Kingsley; produced and directed by the author). Same day this violent polemic against the world's munitions makers opened in Manhattan last week, the League of Nations estimated that $9,295,000,000 was spent on armaments in 1935. The action of Mr. Kingsley's play, however, closes in 1927. In Ten Million Ghosts, Sir Basil Zaharoff is transformed into ''Zacharey'' (George Coulouris). France's great steel & armaments association, the Comite des Forges, is called "Universe Forges Inc." A young French poet named Andre (Orson Welles) is in love with Madeleine de Kruif (Barbara O'Neil). He becomes a War aviator, goes to the Briey sector in 1917, when the secret machinations of the munitioneers are in full swing. Forbidden to bomb the mines, he understands the reason from the conversations of Zacharey & de Kruif, starts after the mines on his own, is shot down and dies behind the German lines. Madeleine marries Zacharey. who is decorated by three governments.

The last scene is an ornate hotel room in Geneva, where more machinations have disrupted a disarmament conference. A U. S. journalist (Otto Hulett), who has been "selling his soul'' by writing jingoistic trash for a U. S. jingo newspaper tycoon, decides to stop it even if it costs him his job, reads the riot act to Zacharey, loudly swears to spend the rest of his life exposing him.

In Dead End and Pulitzer Prizewinning Men in White, Sidney Kingsley was given more credit for the validity and sincerity of his dramatic ideas than for his way of handling the tools of his craft. In Ten Million Ghosts this discrepancy is even wider. The characters move in an atmosphere of unreality. Verified facts are blurted so awkwardly that they assume a cloak of incredibility. Furthermore, most spectators will agree that the thesis that armament makers are the sole cause of war is too old and battered for adult consideration. Best feature of Ten Million Ghosts is the settings-particularly one of a Universe Forges gun works-by 34-year-old Donald Oenslager, who is making a strong bid to add his name to those of Norman Bel Geddes (see p. 47), Lee Simonson, Jo Mielziner and Robert Edmond Jones as one of the ablest stage designers in the U. S.

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