Theatre: New Plays in Manhattan: Oct. 20, 1930

Civic Repertory Theatre. Eva Le-Gallienne’s enterprise got underway for its fifth season with one new presentation, The Green Cockatoo by Arthur Schnitzler. Mr. Schnitzler’s playlet advances the notion that slumming was a popular diversion in France during the reign of Louis XVI. Undaunted by the fact that the Bastille has just fallen, a band of gallants and their lady friends come to roister in the tavern of one Prospère. The host has planted actors in the crowd to relate bloodcurdling events, thrill the guests, give them their money’s worth. Climax of the satire comes when one mummer, having proclaimed that he has just murdered his wife’s lover, finds out that his wife actually has a lover, kills him as he enters the resort.

Aside from the repertoire of 20 plays which have been presented in the past and will be put on again, seven new pieces will be on view during Civic Repertory’s coming season: Siegfried by Jean Giraudoux; Alison’s House by Susan Glaspell (based on the life of Emily Dickinson); Alice in Wonderland; Gruach and Ardvor-lich’s Wife by Gordon Bottomley; Noble Prize by Hjalinar Bergman; Rosmersholm by Ibsen.

Stepdaughters of War. Ten years ago this play would have been a sensation. But during the past decade there has been so much literary and dramatic to-do about the War that apparently there is now no zone left unturned. Probably as a result of this, Stepdaughters of War seems more like an anthology compiled from previous versions of the late unpleasantness than an autonomous production.

The play is adapted by able Kenyon Nicholson from the novel of Helen Zenna Smith. It is concerned with the activities of an English woman’s ambulance unit. Early in the play the atmosphere of reminiscence begins to creep in when Kit (Katherine Alexander), weary and broken in spirit, bitterly denounces the hypocritical idealism that the home folk maintain about the War—suggestive of similar sequences in Suspense and What Price Glory. Also, as in What Price Glory, there is a good deal of hysterical cursing of superiors. And as in Journey’s End there is a member of the outfit who is whimpering about, losing her nerve.

Although she has a fiancé at home, Kit develops and exhibits the same we-only-live-once attitude toward morality that was brought forth in War Birds, subsequently in many a cinema. On a short leave she meets Captain Hilder (Warren Williams), who, like “Uncle” in Journey’s End, has spent a quiet holiday in building a rock garden at his country home. Seemingly out of a sense of duty, Kit spends the night with him. After her friend is killed, Kit leaves the ambulances, returns home where she runs into Captain Hilder again, falls in love with him.

Circumstances cause her to go back to France where she again meets her lover. But by this time they both are worn out; he has received a wound which renders him sterile—as did the narrator of The Sun Also Rises. Exhausted when the Armistice comes they have little reason for continuing their lives—recalling the termination of All Quiet on the Western Front—but decide to live quietly together, hoping in the end to become “rather cheerful ghosts.”

Both Miss Alexander and Mr. Williams do their utmost for the piece, but a composite ghost it still remains. Brown Buddies. The opinion that Bill Robinson, “The Dark Cloud of Joy,” is the world’s greatest tap-dancer, announced at a recent convention of the American Association of Dance Masters (TIME, Sept. 8), is shared by many. For more than 30 years he pranced around Benjamin Franklin Keith’s vaudeville circuit. Two years ago he entered musi-comedy with an appearance in Blackbirds of 1928. If he was not the first man to clog up and down a set of stairs, he is certainly the foremost practitioner of that routine. The later or developed Robinson period is probably now at its zenith. No longer does the dancer depend on gyrations for his effect, but on an economical, effortless pedal rattattattoo which is accomplished sometimes standing still, some times with but one foot.

Unhappily, Brown Buddies has very little to offer in the way of entertainment besides Bill Robinson. The situation is somewhat grotesque, having to do with a group of colored folk from East St. Louis who go to war, accompanied by comedians, chorus girls and an ingénue under the aegis of the Y. M. C. A. Adelaide Hall, a veteran of Blackbirds, is one of the noncombatants. Her singing and dancing is on a par with the entertainment furnished in a good many Harlem resorts. There are only two tunes, “In Missouria” and “Give Me AMan Like That,”which audiencescould leave the theatre whistling. But small, dapper Bill Robinson’s peerless hoofing and broad smile are worth any one’s $3.