The Theater: Other Plays in Manhattan

Three Men and a Woman. Demonstrating that sex can raise its ugly head “down under” as well as any other place on the Globe, Three Men and a Woman is concerned with the doings in a lighthouse on Cape Forlorn, New Zealand. Why the God-fearing keeper (William Desmond) married his lecherous wife (Franc Hale) is something Australian Playwright Frank Harvey does not explain. When her husband goes to the mainland, she betrays him with his assistant (old Melodramatist Walker Whiteside). When an absconder turns up with the loot of an investment company to which her husband’s savings are entrusted, she promptly switches her affections to him. When the absconder jumps off the lighthouse and kills himself, she steals the money and goes off with a lighthouse inspector. The whole business is strictly second-rate entertainment.

Black Tower tries to frighten you with the antics of a maniacal physician who has a gallery full of corpses, mummified and glace-coated, to which he wishes to add a young girl he has picked up. And fails. Co-author is Lora Baxter, who appeared last week in The Animal Kingdom (see above).