Theatre: New Plays in Manhattan: Feb. 10, 1930

Recapture. When a man writes a smash hit, Broadway’s ingenuous habitues always assume that his next play will be just as great a success. Recapture got them all excited because its author is Preston Sturges, whose Strictly Dishonorable (TIME, Sept. 30) is still a smash hit. In Strictly Dishonorable Playwright Sturges exhibits a talent for writing risque themes and a romanticism as all-pervading as that of Grimm and Hans Andersen. But he is not yet a playwright of stature. He can crack a smart joke, can treat sex with refinement; can also devise such ill-assembled, trivial drama as Recapture, which deals with the efforts of an ex-wife (Ann Andrews) and ex-husband (Melvyn Douglas) to regain the bliss of their honeymoon in its original vicinity near Vichy, France. The man becomes practically convinced that reunion is desirable. The woman feels sure it is not. Their differences are settled when she is killed in the collapse of a hotel elevator. This florid metal grill contrivance, in the best open Gallic style, is the most interesting element, architectural or personal, in the play.

The Women Have Their Way. The

playwright-brothers Serafin and Joaquin Alvarez Quintero seem to produce, their collaborations in the drowsy noons of their native Spain, recording the gentle disturbances which occur in villages where everyone is either anticipating or taking a siesta. Earlier this season, Otis Skinner’s genial grunts sounded almost melodramatic in the Quinteros’ languorous A Hundred Years Old (TIME, Oct. 14). And now Eva Le Gallienne, simply by swirling on stage in a dark wig and a bright gown with innumerable ruffles, creates what amounts to consternation in a similarly torpid drama. She is the village belle, and all that happens is a delicate demonstration that when village gossips decide it would be nice for her to be wooed by the visitor from Madrid, that handsome young man is practically forced into courtship.

But the Quintero quiet does not lead to boredom. The brothers realize that when there are no big things to be dramatic, small things become so. Theirs is a glancing, fragile but wholly affecting art. The Civic Repertory company interprets it admirably.

Because The Women Have Their Way is only two acts long, it was preceded by The Open Door, a pretentious one-act triangle play by Alfred Sutro.

The serenity of the Quinteros is partially explained by the fact that they are Andalusians from idle, baking, southern Spain. Born in Utrera (Serafin is 58, Joaquin Alvarez 56), they have never married, have never published anything which does not bear both their names. Before his death, an older brother Pedro was as close to them as they are still to each other, but he criticized rather than collaborated. Their first play (Esgrima y amor) was given in Seville when Serafin was 16. The tradition of fecundity commonly attached to Spanish dramatists, largely due to the labors of the prodigious Lope Felix de Vega (1562-1635) who wrote 520 plays, has been upheld in a more credible fashion by the Quinteros. Between 1897 and 1912 they wrote more than 80 of their sly, kindly, classically re strained dramas. Among the most popu lar: El Patio, Las Flares, El genio alegre, Malvaloca.