New Plays in Manhattan

The Fireman's Flame (written and produced by Jerrold & John Krimsky respectively) is for beer drinkers in a whiskey mood. It records a seething rivalry between two rival fire companies in Manhattan's 80s; the love of an heir long lost for the ward of a Wall Street "fox"; the evil designs of two villains upon the fox's fortunes; the inevitable triumph of integrity. In the course of the fustian action, a locket is spirited from a painted backdrop bureau, hot villainous breath ruffles ostrich feathers on a period hat, a ticker tape registers cataclysmic unsteadiness in railroad stocks; eight Fire Belles dance with breathless abandon, and two fire engines race to a fire.

The American Music Hall, now housing its fourth bumpkin melodrama, used to be a church. Last week it was revealed that twelve deceased ex-parishioners have left legacies to an edifice no longer sacred; and the producers' consciences have been pricked by quarterly donations from the American Bible Society. But if the Brothers Krimsky are as successful with The Fireman's Flame as they have been with their previous ventures in the genre, Murder in the Old Red Barn and Naughty-Naught ('00), they will need no further alms.

Brother John, business head, and Brother Jerrold, literary partner, did research for their piece in the Museum of the City of New York, took as a pseudonym for Melodramatist Jerrold: John Van Antwerp Van Ostend.

The Music Hall's audiences are seated at tables, served anything they think they can stand, usually continue their fun at a bar downstairs after the show. Though more sophisticated than Broadway cabaret crowds, they have made so much cheer-&-jeer noise in the past that neighbors of the ex-church have complained. The Krimskys, on probation, must periodically pledge decorum to a deputy police commissioner.

To Quito and Back (by Ben Hecht; produced by the Theatre Guild, Inc.). Despite the undeniable flash and detonation of the salvo of Ben Hecht epigrams on love, social justice et al., with which the Theatre Guild saluted the opening of its 20th season last week, Manhattan play-goers found To Quito and Back largely a talkfest in the Andes, detected in Author Hecht's author-hero an unhappy hesitance and uncertainty.

A breathtaking, gloriously pell-mell first scene packs the essential people of the play--the wife-&-world-fleeing Alexander Sterns (Leslie Banks), the other woman (Sylvia Sidney), and a British consular official (Francis Compton)--out of a thronged Andean railway station and off for Quito by automobile in company with Zamiano (Joseph Buloff), peasant leader of an anti-Fascist revolt.

Not long thereafter, however, the play bogs down under the weight of its own rhetoric at a villa outside Quito, where Sterns helps Zamiano direct his revolution while others at the villa plot against it. and Miss Sidney, in an anomalous position when Sterns's wife fails to divorce him, beats frantically and ineffectually against the bars of circumstance. Sterns, brilliantly convincing to those about him, finally solves his own indecisions in a quixotic last act gesture, dying with the valiant Zamiano in a forlorn last stand against the Fascists.

What dramatic force there is to the play is heightened by the work of Joseph Buloff, who alone of the cast seemed to get completely inside his assigned characterization. The sardonic comedy of Evelyn Varden, as mistress of the villa, helps, but Author Hecht failed to pencil in much of a part for Sylvia Sidney, six years absent from the Manhattan stage, with the result that the whole counterplot love story seems a device to accent the general indecisiveness of Hero Sterns.

A few Hechtisms, all of which sound better in the acoustics of a theatre: "We [the intellectuals] are always on the right side of discussions, but never on any side of the barricades"; "There's only one thing that's definitely known about God; He's on the side of the winner"; "If you get tired of the Fascist salute, the Bronx cheer is always waiting for you"; "Old love is garrulous . . . like a demented Cook's guide, swooning in front of all the landmarks and monuments"; "I'm a pathetic figure, an old best seller."

Product of Chicago's school of fireball journalism, Author Hecht covered Latin uprisings, in Berlin followed the Spartacists' uprising against the Ebert Government, ran the Chicago Literary Times, a bohemian and radical sheet. He and Charles MacArthur, another Chicago newspaper bravo, wrote The Front Page in 1928 and thereby hit professional pay dirt. During a fling with MacArthur in film production, a venture that improved their backgammon game but not their bank accounts, the pair found time to write the book for Billy Rose's Jumbo. Hecht confessed once that the drama was not a suitable medium for him ("I've never been able to compact an idea into three acts"). Last July he referred to Hollywood fame as "a load of clams" at which "a dreaming of his dithyrambs, our gallant Thespis thumbs his nose," few days later signed to write for Cinemogul Samuel Goldwyn at $260,000 annually, Hollywood's highest writing stipend. Soon thereafter he went on leave to try compacting two more ideas into three acts each. In the tortured and tortuous mental life of his hero Sterns in To Quito and Back, friends of Playwright Hecht thought they saw more than a trace of autobiography.

Susan and God (by Rachel Crothers; produced by John Golden). With the consummate stage artistry of Gertrude Lawrence brought whimsically to bear on the egregious Oxford Groupers (Buchmanites), Rachel Crothers and John Golden last week brightened up Broadway's hitherto lacklustre season with Susan and God.

Playwright Crothers pays most of her attention to Susan, a skittish matron who has barged in on drawing-room Buchmanism abroad, and has returned to bring this grand new message of the inspirational values of open confession straight from the horse mouth of one Lady Wiggam to her own circle of friends. In one week end of sustained busybodying, Susan manages, by artful innuendo and a few lucky potshots, to disrupt the placidly illicit love life of her hostess, turn a well adjusted May-December marriage into a triangular mess.

Almost forgotten in the zeal of Susan's trial flight into misapplied evangelism, her husband Barrie (Paul McGrath), who drinks too much but loves her, finally convinces her that this new sweetness-&-light gospel deserves a trial at home, if only for the sake of their budding daughter, Blossom (Nancy Kelly). There, the surrounding countryside strewn with the wreckage of her meddling, Susan manages at last to get things back in focus.

Prime weakness of the play is that Actress Lawrence interprets Susan Trexel's character as so essentially hypocritical that the final redemption worked out for her by Playwright Crothers seems at best a bit shaky. Should Susan ever hear about theosophy or about the opportunities for field work in the search for baby giant pandas, the home fires would die out again.

Manhattan was impressed with Paul McGrath's finely tempered, self-reliant job as Barrie Trexel. When the play opened on September 20 in Washington, Actor McGrath had a minor part, Osgood Perkins the lead. After the opening Actor Perkins walked to his hotel, died in his apartment following a heart attack. "I like that role," he had said, "I hope the play never closes." Actor McGrath, veteran of a dozen or more Broadway appearances (Ned McCobb's Daughter, Night of January 16, The Green Bay Tree, et al.) stepped into the lead next night. Except for a canceled Wednesday matinee, ordered because of the condition of Actress Lawrence, who had gone 66 hours without sleep, the show went on without interruption through its Washington and Baltimore engagements.

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