The Theatre: New Plays in Manhattan: Feb. 27, 1933

Alien Corn (By Sidney Howard; Katharine Cornell, producer). Once every year or so comes a fine play like this one to bring dignity and value to the U. S. Theatre. As a rule, Eugene O’Neill writes it. This time it is written by another excellent native stagecraftsman, Sidney Howard.

Conway College lies a few hours west of Chicago. It is a struggling little plantation of bay and laurel choking in the broad fields of alien corn. It was inherited by Harry Conway (James Rennie), and he and his wife (Lily Cahill) are rich and tolerant enough to let it flourish—within certain limits. Its faculty is a representative cross-cut of indigenous academic life. There are a prig and a politician. Small, timid Professor Stockton (E. J. Ballantine) has found that pistol practice and an occasional mild laxative keep his nerve up. Another professor, blessedly resigned, loves to teach, ”even if they don’t learn a damned thing.” Still another, Elsa Brandt (Katharine Cornell), spiritually writhes in agony in the bondage of the music department. She would give her soul to be a concert pianist.

Old Ottokar Brandt (Siegfried Rumann of Grand Hotel), a great bear of a man whose crippled left arm once played a gifted violin, has taught his daughter all he knows of music. Now she must go to Vienna. During the midyear vacation a scholarship is vacated. It may be Elsa’s chance. When she fails to get it she enlists the sympathy and warm admiration of Harry Conway. They fall in love, although they try to control it. “It’s surprising,” says Elsa, with a wry twist of the mouth, “the things we can control.”

There was to have been a concert, at which brocaded Mrs. Conway was to have sung, which might have made Elsa some money to help her get away. That falls through when the pianist’s romance with Mr. Conway comes out. Then there is a financially disastrous little concert which Elsa arranges herself. In jealous pique, Mrs. Conway has her removed from the faculty. Then neurotic Professor Vardaman (Luther Adler), who has tried Professor Stockton’s psychological trick with the pistol, hysterically kills himself when he finds Elsa in Harry Conway’s arms.

Now, says Harry Conway, Elsa must give up the fight and find peace with him. A policeman comes in to investigate the suicide.

“You are on the faculty?” the officer asks Elsa.

Over Harry Conway’s protests she shouts: “No. No! I am a concert pianist!”

“This is where you live?”

“No! Vienna!”

The beauty and power of Miss Cornell’s art have never been set to better advantage. A cast of able actors performs with rare sympathy parts which are written with uniform deftness and inspiration. Alien Corn has to it the good salt taste of Ibsen. In 1925 Playwright Howard got a Pulitzer Prize for his They Knew What They Wanted. He may well get another.

Melody (words & music by Edward Childs Carpenter, Irving Caesar & Sig-mund Romberg; George White, producer). During a hiatus between Scandals, Producer White has turned his attention to operetta. This one is handsome, melodious, appealing to ear & eye rather than funnybone. It is the sort of play in which, by 11 o’clock, most of the actors are impersonating their grandchildren, for it begins in 1881, ends in 1933. Everett Marshall, having assisted Evelyn Herbert to cuckold her high-born husband on her wedding night, departs with French troops to Africa and is killed off early in Act I. But Producer White has another expensive baritone, Walter Woolf. ready to step into the breach and lush, blonde Miss Herbert is happily reincarnated, thus holding the stage to the end. If you are patient and like Romberg music, you should enjoy yourself at Melody.

One Sunday Afternoon (by James Hagan; Leo Peters & Leslie J. Spiller, producers). Here is a play sure in its unpretentious telling of a wholesome, sometimes humorous, sometimes moving story. A frieze of homely figures on a Mid-western ground, One Sunday Afternoon opens in the shabby dental parlor of Biff Grimes. D. D. S. (Lloyd Nolan, an able new-comer). Stimulated by an old crony, a bottle of rye and innumerable repetitions of “in the good old summer time.” Biff’s imagination reaches sadly back to his youth in another little town. Nostalgia gives way to intemperate anger when he thinks of the injustices he received at the hands of rich Hugo Barnstead. The telephone rings. The affluent Mr. Barnstead is in the hotel just across the street, stricken with toothache. When he appears for treatment there is considerable doubt whether the angry Biff, gas cap in hand, will ever let him out of the operating chair alive. There is a fadeback and the audience is presented with the case history.

Biff really wanted to marry Virginia. His chances looked good for a while until Hugo swept her off her feet in Schneider’s beer garden. On the rebound, inarticulate, dazed Biff married Amy (Francesca Bruning). Followed a row with Hugo in Hugo’s uncle’s factory and a two-year jail term for Biff.

When lie got out. he and Amy moved away. Amy was good to him. They lived comfortably. And yet, a still small voice kept telling Biff, if he had married Virginia, somehow life would not have been quite so mediocre.

Biff does not kill Hugo. Virginia, whose hair has grown blonde and her tongue sharp, grudgingly comes to watch her husband lose another cuspid. So grateful is Biff for the relief of his disillusionment that he does not charge Hugo a cent for the extraction. He dismisses the quarreling couple, picks up his faithful Amy. tells her she has the best legs in town, decides to buy a new car.

Four O’Clock (by Nan O’Reilly & Rupert Darrell; Charles Henderson, producer’) presents in garbled form the sad case of Benita Franklin Bischoff, alias Vivian Gordon, a lady extortionist who was found choked to death in New York City on the eve of giving evidence to Inquisitor Samuel Seabury (TIME, March 9, 1931 et seq.) and whose daughter killed herself after the mother’s death revealed the mother’s profession. Shooting irons are kept hot throughout most of the performance. Corrupt policemen, gunmen and dope peddlers abound.* A Miss Betty Worth wears some black underwear. Actually, none of this is very exciting.

*Last week the New York police department reinstated three policemen whom the late stoolpigeon Chile Mapocha Acuna, during the Seabury investigation, accused of using him to “frame” women on vice charges. At the same time, ousted Magistrate Jean Norris sued the producers of Four O’Clock, recognizing herself as the “woman judge” referred to in the play.