New Plays in Manhattan

Mamba's Daughters (dramatized by Dorothy & DuBose Heyward from his novel; produced by Guthrie McClintic) is not another Porgy. It equals Porgy as a document on Negro dialect and folkways, has some exciting, a few touching moments. But if Mamba's Daughters took one step more it would topple over into sheer ten-twent-thirt.

Mamba's Daughters tells of big, awkward, blundering, childlike Hagar (Ethel Waters) and her passionate, inarticulate love for her daughter, Lissa. Her dream is to make a lady of Lissa. But a misstep on the girl's part threatens her reputation. To keep it intact the frantic mother commits both murder and suicide.

Violent and anarchic the life of Charleston Negroes may be, and fierce and swelling the power of mother love. But the Heywards, using an old sucked orange of a plot, have squashed the pulp all over the stage. Only the mildness of Charleston's climate keeps Hagar from doing another Eliza crossing the ice.

Only thing that gives the play distinction is Ethel Waters' playing of Hagar. In her first dramatic role the famed singer of blues and hotcha shames the play's bogus tear-jerking with her own deep and honest intensity. More moving than anything in the story are the fugitive looks of love and suffering that every so often cross Ethel Waters' plain, brown, human face.

Three days after Mamba's Daughters opened, 19 notables--including Actresses Judith Anderson, Tallulah Bankhead and Dorothy Gish, Scene-Designer Norman Bel Geddes, Author Carl Van Vechten, and Publishers Cass Canfield and John Farrar --ran a testimonial in the N. Y. Times:

"The undersigned feel that ETHEL WATERS' superb performance in Mamba's Daughters at the Empire Theatre is a profound emotional experience which any playgoer would be the poorer for missing. It seems indeed to be such a magnificent example of great acting . . . that we are glad to pay for the privilege of saying so."

The Gentle People (by Irwin Shaw; produced by The Group Theatre). Usually propaganda plays are grim, clenched, bellicose. But the social message of Irwin Shaw's "Brooklyn fable" is as softly conveyed as a woman's "Yes." The Gentle People is the story of two benevolent middle-aged cronies down Coney Island way who love to fish of an evening. A tough young gangster (Franchot Tone) extorts "protection money" from them. He seduces one man's daughter (Sylvia Sidney). At length he demands their savings. Their patience pushed too far, the outraged cronies decide to drown their tormentor. Once they do, everybody becomes as happy as a clam at high tide.

Clearly Playwright Shaw's soft-spoken melodrama is a parable of how the gentle souls of the world, taxed too far, rise up and destroy their oppressors, whether neighborhood bullies or world-famed Reichsfuehrers. Put as blithely as Shaw puts it, it is a cheering idea. The trouble is that, while it makes The Gentle People a likable fable, it makes it an absurd play. Humorous mood and melodramatic plot refuse to jell. Murder is usually a fairly serious business, and murder conceived and carried out by two good-natured fishermen should be fairly agonizing. Instead it becomes a piece of hanky-panky, awkward, grotesque, unreal.

Back on Broadway for the first time after six years in Hollywood, Franchot Tone--an original member of The Group Theatre--proved nimble in his gangster role, but too suave and lacking in guts.

The Primrose Path (By Robert L. Buckner & Walter Hart; produced by George Abbott). Eccentric families have become common as dirt on the stage. The family in The Primrose Path is not only screwy but scandalous. Overflowing a ramshackle homestead, the Wallaces, except for one unsociable white sheep who insists on being respectable, are a cheerfully depraved clan. Grandma is a gamy old bawd, who in her day plucked most of the primroses along the path. Her married daughter, Emma, is a talented and popular lady of the evening. Her granddaughter, Eva, too young to do anything worse than swear like a trooper, lines up at the starting post of womanhood ready to outrun the fastest of her family. Less stuffy folk than the Wallaces would be hard to find; they might say with Burns:

Let them cant about decorum

Who have characters to lose.

Short on inhibitions, The Primrose Path at its rosiest is all downhill and no brakes. Were all the characters as rowdy and ribald as Grandma, the play would blow the audience into the middle of next year. But the rest of the family, if unconventional, are given to normal moments of joy and sorrow. After mixing Grandma's outrageous antics with her son-in-law's gruesome suicide and her granddaughter's rocky romance, The Primrose Path fails to come off as well as it might. For, though humor and pathos make the best of friends, realism and farce are immemorial foes.

Though no acknowledgment of source is made, The Primrose Path strikes many a playgoer as a dramatization of Victoria Lincoln's popular novel, February Hill (1934). First mentioned for production by Sam H. Harris in 1935, the play went unproduced for three years, after a Fall River, Mass, woman, charging that February Hill maligned members of her family, sued Author Lincoln for $100,000. So far the case has not come to trial.

Producer Abbott apparently believes that the impending suit will not affect the play, for the family of February Hill is named Harris and lives in Fall River, whereas the family of The Primrose Path is named Wallace and lives in "a small town near Buffalo."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.