New Play in Manhattan

The Talley Method (by S. N. Behrman, produced by The Playwrights' Co.). Playwright Behrman is one of the most adult living playwrights and his new seriocomedy tackles a grown-up theme--the fact that the social achievements of the human race are so far behind its technical development. He studies this social lag in the personality of a widower, Dr. Axton Talley (Philip Merivale), who is a brilliant surgeon of bodies but scarcely even aware of emotional anatomy. He has nothing but anger for his daughter's adolescent radicalism, nothing but contempt for his son's inability to stomach the medical school dissecting room. When the doctor gets engaged to a poetess (Ina Claire) she leads him into abortive attempts to approach his children. But finally his inability to move out of his insensitivity so alarms her that she breaks the engagement, leaves him to his steely bewilderment.

Philip Merivale, resembling Black Jack Pershing in mufti, plays the doctor so feelingly that he becomes an object almost for sympathy rather than dislike. He does two splendid bits: 1) when he handles a copy of the New Masses as though it were a bushmaster (see cut), and 2) when his emotions get the better of his rigidity and, standing ramrod straight, he tells his fiancee: "I love you." Unfortunately the finely conceived and acted doctor is surrounded by drama that wavers uncertainly between comedy and solemnity. The comedy, as often with Behrman, tends to be forced, brittle. The solemnity isn't pointed up. And Ina Claire, far from the glittering kind of role that made her name, seems wooden and routine.

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