Theatre: New Plays: Nov. 1, 1926

Criss Cross. Charles B. Dillingham’s big dress-parade is possessed of every grace except humor. Lively dancers, good tunes, gorgeous costumes are presented in abundance. Criss Cross could find no ready market for its splendors, however, were it not for that priceless pair, Stone pere and Stone fille. Dad’s acrobatic clowning discovers laughs that the lines themselves never even hinted at, while Daughter’s unspoiled charm is one of Broadway’s fresh delights. The dull book goes on at length concerning a simple maid who is about to be begged, borrowed, or stolen from her French Academy shelter by ruthless wooers, when Stone, the elder, swoops along in an airplane, hanging by his heels, and flips the lass into a heavier-than-air-haven. Loud applause—for sweet Dorothy, her still agile ancestor, and Mr. Dillingham’s sumptuous effects.

The Straw Hat. In the American Laboratory Theatre, one of New York’s repertory houses, Richard Boleslavsky, formerly director of the First Moscow Art Theatre Studio, stages a delightful, farcical frivolity that skips over the stage and down the aisles on pleasantly intimate terms with its audience. A French bridegroom must match a rare straw hat on his wedding day. Encumbered by a rural wedding party, driven by a fierce Lieutenant, he squirms from one ticklish situation to another, while the audience’s amusement is heightened by music with strong rhythm, a buoyant chorus of youthful actors, ingenious flipping about of scenery.

Tragic Eighteen. Under brown, rugged ceiling beams, from a row of quaint stalls that-substitute for balcony and gallery in the Charles Hopkins Theatre, the audience follows, sympathetically but a trifle wearily, the fortunes of an Iowa innocent (Neil Martin) on Columbia University’s Broadway campus. Even before classes have fairly begun, he is in love with a chorus girl. Mother and brother are powerless to interfere. Not till the unfortunate chorus girl confides that she is possessed of a hidden liability five months old does poor Teddy go back to his books, a sadder and a wiser man. The best reason for visiting Charles Hopkins Theatre these days is to see the little theatre itself.

God Loves Us. Joseph P. McEvoy, author of Americana, The Potters, comic supplements, slashes bitterly at the huge industrial juggernaut that rolls flat the spirit of Hector Maclnerny Midge, average U. S. citizen. Though many have essayed to deal out Menckian blows this season, nothing on the current stage satirizes so incisively, originally, the cruel banalities of “big business, gogetters” as does this play about a man who is stuck for life at the assistant sales-manager level of a greeting card manufactory. At a “Father and Son” luncheon, the Reverend Harold Klump, “he-Christian,” sounds the keynote of large-scale production as applied to the spiritual side of life. He will get men into his church if he has to run prize fights in the pulpit, foot races down the aisles, and circularize through the mail. “If Paul of Tarsus [loud cheers for Paul, ‘the first Christian go-getter’] was not above inditing epistles to Thessalonia, I’m not above writing letters to the Bronx.” When a belated spark of rebellion lights up Mr. Midge’s poor soul, family responsibilities smother it to death. Mr. McEvoy’s brilliant lines are aided by effective staging in the “constructivist” technique—spotlighting that reveals, in various quarters and levels of the same stage, several different offices, the Midge parlor, a radio concert in the making, and other snapshots of life’s middle-class procession.

We Americans is different. For one thing, it dives into the melting pot business without fetching up an Irish-Jewish wedding. For another, it keeps itself, in this nervous age, as innocent of agitated movement as a stuffed porpoise. The entire second act, shunted in bodily from the vaudeville circuit, consists of a classroom scene, leaves the slight plot snoozing at practically the same complication it had reached when the curtain crept down on Act I. The audience was quick to appreciate that vaudeville interpolation. More than a series of dialect jokes is the picture of Life’s graduating seniors entering the Freshman class of night school in order to fill the gaping rift between Old and New World customs with a little pitifully mastered book-knowledge, in order to understand the foreign ways of their own U.S.-born children. Probably Playwrights Gropper and Siegel felt they had to make a comedy out of it, so in Act III, Daughter returns to the parental fold, puts aside a flashy lover for the night-school teacher, the young people stay in on occasional evenings, and Papa admits a few modifying Americanisms into the rigidly Talmudic routine of the household. As diversified Jewish types, Actors Sam Mann, Clara Langsner, Muni Wisenfrend, and Luther Adler write whole life histories into feeble, broken lines, and it is in their creative work that the play’s chief virtue lies.

White Wings. At 30, reticent, sensitive, Philip Barry finds himself well in the van of younger U.S. playwrights. Four of his plays have been produced: You and I (47 Workshop Harvard Prize Play, 1923); The Youngest (1924); In A Garden (1925); White Wings (1926). Not all have been successful, financially. But Mr. Barry is a success. Confidently, he holds definite opinions: he must have a year in which to write a play; Terence is his idea of a good playwright; he refuses to limit himself to one or two special themes; realism, “a slice of life,” means nothing in the theatre. He detests being described as “whimsical.” Yet that adjective better than any other, perhaps, describes the art that is making enthusiastic audiences smile and sigh these fall evenings at the Booth Theatre.

Back in the gay ’90s when a horse was a horse, and mere man’s civilization revolved about a centre of equine transportation, white wings were society’s props. Archie Inch was a white wing; so was Archie’s father; so was Archie’s grandfather; just so all Inches, by birth, tradition, inheritance, were white wings. Alas! that the horse must go the way of all flesh, that the inhuman horseless carriage should sweep up yesterday’s honored white wings, dump them in the rubbish can of outworn traditions. Mary (Winifred Lenihan), faithful to her father’s revolutionary gas-buggy, loves and will always love Archie, the Quixotic, uniformed champion of the horse. Of course, when Mary shoots Josie, the last horse, there is nothing more for Archie to be loyal to, so he turns with a sigh to the taxicab Mary purchased for him, and it ends happily—except for poor old Josie. Mr. Barry presents it all in a fantasy-pageant, tender, sometimes sharply satirical. Never does he allow the symbolism to intrude upon the essential humanity of his men, women, and horse. Every minute is genuine theatre—a quaint hodgepodge, loosely bundled together, always delightful.