Theater: New Plays in Manhattan: Sep. 4, 1933

Love and Babies (by Herbert P. Mc-Cormack, produced by Morris Green and Frank McCoy) is a domestically salacious trifle purporting to show how husbands and wives talk about procreation. Plot: a wife wants a baby, her husband does not. To soften him the wife invites as guests a couple who have a baby. The childless husband takes an interest but keeps his attitude. Meanwhile the father-husband fears his child has stolen his wife’s love, receives an invitation from the childless wife to father her baby. He agrees, then reneges because he wants the other husband to suffer as he has. Finally the childless husband decides that a baby would be acceptable. Animating this dummy are four of Manhattan’s most capable actors: for the childless husband & wife, Ernest Truex and Linda Watkins; for the fertile husband & wife, Glenn Anders and Ruth Weston. Truex’s quick, frozen smile and suburban fussiness, Anders’ handwringing and close attention to business, Miss Watkins’ gentle hysterics, actually produce an evening’s entertainment. Manhattan audiences blushed for as much as at such lines as (Anders): “What has happened to our love? I’ve become just a biological accomplice.”

A Party (by Ivor Novello, produced by William A. Brady and Samuel F. E. Nirdlinger) is a slice of pure snob entertainment off the heel of the loaf. It projects a party given for a famed young London actress after her opening night: Lora Baxter in distant simulacrum of Tallulah Bankhead. Plot: Miss Baxter inveigles her old lover, now married, into kissing her. His little wife sees the kiss and tries to die by gulping all of what she thinks is Miss Baxter’s cocaine. But it is only powdered sugar and her swoon is a symptom only of autosuggestion. Subplot: is or is not Miss Baxter a dope addict?

Author Novello, an assiduous London partygoer, has accurately noted many a curio of London theatrical parties. Present at this one are two celebrities: famed Mrs. Patrick Campbell as a famed “Mrs. MacDonald,” and able Cecilia (“Cissie”) Loftus. A Party projects such a party completely, including onlookers’ boredom and painted embarrassment for the participants.

The second act is frankly vaudeville. Giving in to the frantic cries of the guests, Miss Loftus does excellent parodies of Ethel Barrymore, Pauline Lord, Fannie Brice, Constance Collier and any vaudeville duo singing “It’s Wonderful, It’s Marvelous.” Suddenly Mrs. Campbell turns from her formidably charming self into something strange and pretentious reciting Hecuba’s speech from Euripides’ The Trojan Women, then a fable about a mermaid. A girl sings some songs. The guests scream interminably for more.

Pretty, long-legged Lora Baxter is shrill, restless, self-centred and predatory as Tallulah Bankhead. When her part calls for acting, she rants and waves her arms as Miss Bankhead would never do, even at home. Most of the time Mrs. Campbell’s flat face, truculent mouth and huge eyes dominate the proceedings with lines which may very well have been contributed by herself. A Party, scarcely a play, is based on the novel idea that some people who cannot, would like to go to a celebrity party. It succeeds in exploding the idea that such a party is worth going to. Typical line: “I never understood Venice. It’s just another Italian city, only flooded.”

“But flooded with great care, my dear.” Beatrice Stella Tanner Campbell Corn-wallis-West, now 68, had failed once as an actress when her husband went to South Africa for a tuberculosis cure, leaving 22-year-old Mrs. Campbell with two children. When he came home six years later he found his wife the toast of London, friend of George Bernard Shaw, famed enough to add a line of her own to Shaw’s Pygmalion. Between her husband’s death in the Boer War and her son’s death in the World War, she became famed for having her own way, once had a ton of tanbark dumped in Manhattan’s 42nd Street to mute traffic noises during her performance.