Theatre: New Plays in Manhattan: Oct. 24, 1927

Porgy. While the Theatre Guild’s most highly paid employes* were weaving spells for gratified Chicago audiences and the first road company†was about to open in Hanover, N. H., to a rapt gathering of Dartmouth undergraduates, the Guild raised its Manhattan curtain on a troupe of Negroes. Meeting the ceaseless mutter that the Guild worships at the shrine of foreign playwriting, the first selection went completely native. It is set at Charleston’s docks, written in Negro patois, deals with purely Negro problems (as opposed to most plays and books about Negroes, which struggle with race prejudice and intermarriage), is played almost wholly by a company colored without burnt cork.

The play is based on the eminently successful novel of the same name by Du Bose Heyward (white). Its central figure is a crippled boy. The theme: his love for a girl intermittently addicted to dope. The third figure of the triangle is a towering black murderer who is choked to death by the cripple’s steely fingers in the final act.

Back of this gentle fable is fashioned a magnificent background of race humor, pathos, song and hot-blooded simplicity. Dice click, spirituals sigh and scream, superstition stalks and little children chatter. For this background the piece is chiefly notable. The play itself is not a masterpiece. The acting is brilliantly accounted for by a troupe seized from the dusky depths of the vagrant Negro theatre.

These violently uncertain elements were whipped into a poignant pageant of emotion by Rouben Mamoulian. Before Porgy opened, his name meant nothing. The next morning he had three offers from envious producers to come over and stage shows for them. He is 30, an Armenian-Russian; forsook law studies in Moscow to learn his trade in the Third Studio of the Moscow Art Theatre. He was directing for the Eastman Theatre in Rochester when he sought and found a small niche at the Guild. When the directors were exhausted trying to select a suitable director for the treacherously difficult Porgy they asked him if he thought he could do it. He said yes. They, fortunately, believed him. Just how an Armenian-Russian caught the spirit of the U. S. Negro with such astounding skill and subtlety nobody seems to know. Mr. Mamoulian explains it cheerfully by saying he is a Southerner, born in the Caucasus.

There are four white characters in Porgy; all of meagre importance. The name is pronounced, not with the scratchy g of Georgie-Porgie; but with the sharp, hard g of porgy, fish.

The Springboard. If ever critics by dozens are found foully murdered in their beds the police will logically detain Sidney Blackmer as the first suspect. Mr. Blackmer, who has played some parts excellently, is subject to an almost annual avalanche of freezing abuse. This year, he deserves it. He is employed as a devastating lover. He marries the girl. He continues devastation, elsewhere. She sues for divorce. He repents. She repents. Curtain.

Two ladies helped immensely. They were Alice Duer Miller* writing into her first play (alone) much genial, glinting dialog; and Madge Kennedy, fascinating.

White Lights is the sixth†of plays to be produced this season dealing with life behind the scenes of show business. It is a musical comedy with a cabaret singer heroine “who comes from a good family and doesn’t belong in this sort of work.” There is a pretty boy for her to fall in love with and a villain to be firmly foiled.

The Matrimonial Bed. French farce is either very funny or, much oftener, practically fatal. Falling firmly into the latter class, this one deals with a wife twice married. The earlier husband, lost in amnesia, returns; remembers; stages an undressing race with his rival to see who can jump first into the ample piece of furniture cast for the title role.

The Five O’Clock Girl. A large-sized musical comedy descended upon Manhattan, its cap feathered with Mary Eaton & Oscar Shaw. Norman Bel Geddes scenery and a tune (“Thinking of You”) were, many thought, even abler ingredients. The plot, that old dodderer of musical comedies, explained how a modiste’s model married a millionaire. The jokes were moldy, the dancing deft, and the vast chorus uncommonly bewitching. Imbedded none too conspicuously in the generally unwieldy proceedings is an actor named Louis John Bartels, playing his first part on Broadway since he laid a just claim to fame as the blabbering, brilliant hero of The Show-Off.

Synthetic Sin. The girl, desirous of life in capital letters, establishes herselfin an apartment house which, before the evening ends, becomes the stamping ground of bootleggers, thieves & a murderer. She does not go wrong.

Just Fancy. Again the fable of a prince who loved madly but, for his country’s sake, not morganatically. Perhaps it was not considered courteous to the current genial heir to Britain’s throne to make him into a musical comedy. Accordingly the flashback method was dragged out, dusted off, and from a modern prolog the story shifted to a tale of Edward VII adventuring in the U. S. This, of course, meant crinolines; and humor, unfortunately, to match. Pretty tunes and pretty Ivy Sawyer contributed gently. Raymond Hitchcock, infrequent player in Manhattan of late years, developed ingenious theories on the sex of the sardine; was aided ably by Eric Blore, an ass, very bally. The indomitable Mrs. Thomas Whiffen (who first appeared some 50 years ago as Buttercup in H. M. S. Pinafore), danced spryly to an old-time waltz.

The 19th Hole. Frank Craven has written a golf comedy. He introducesa hero who is chiefly interested in stained glass; introduces this hero to a bag of golf clubs; proceeds to develop the domestic difficulties of this hero. Soon a menace appears in the form of a domineering colonel, to whom the dreamy hero refuses to pay a golf wager because he thinks the Colonel cheated. Actor Craven plays more craftily than he writes. The loudest laugh of the piece greets Mr. Craven’s plaintive protest that he did not vilify the Colonel; simply said he was sunk in a ditch.

*Alfred Lunt, Lynn Fontanne, etc., playing The Guardsman, Pygmalion, The Second Man, The Doctor’s Dilemma.

†Headed by George Gaul and Florence Eldridge in The Guardsman, Mr. Pirn Passes By, etc.

*The Charm School (a novel later dramatized in collaboration with Robert Miltone, Are Women People! etc.

†The five others: The Shannons of Broadway (TIME, Oct. 10). Ten Per Cent(TIME, Sept. 26), Mister Romeo (TIME Footlights (TIME, Aug. 29).