The Lake (by Dorothy Massingham and Murray MacDonald; produced by Jed Harris). In this sincere, intelligent but somewhat rambling play, there are two powerful scenes. One occurs when Stella Surrege (Katharine Hepburn), who has broken off a sticky love affair with a horsey neighbor (Geoffrey Wardwell) to marry a kindly, understanding War veteran with £15,000 a year, discovers that she loves her new husband John Clayne . (Colin Clive). It is an hour after their wedding, on a rainy September afternoon. Stella and John are standing under a leaky marquee. Laughing together, they get into their car to go away. The car skids into a lake which fussy old Mrs. Surrege (Frances Starr) has had built beyond the garden. John Clayne is fished out of the lake dead.
The other moving scene comes four days later, when Stella, dazed by her grief, starts out of the Surrege’s drawing room toward the lake to do what she thinks is the only thing left for her to do. Her wise compassionate aunt (Blanche Bates) stops her at the door. They have a conversation from which Stella derives comfort, if not consolation. As the play ends, Stella is again going through the door toward the lake.*
Before The Lake opened in Manhattan last week, with the most expensive premiere of the season, its audience had been led to expect the season’s most exciting play. Producer Jed Harris, active on Broadway again after two years of noisily doing nothing, had assembled a good cast, fine sets by Jo Mielziner. For his lead, he had Katharine Hepburn who had left Broadway two years ago after a modest success in The Warrior’s Husband. During that interval, with four cinema roles, she had made herself the most talked-about actress in the U. S. Too young and too shy, in the presence of an audience, to seem as commanding a personality on the stage as on the screen, she gave a talented, clever performance marred only by a trick of keying her voice to a high, flat monotone to indicate emotional intensity.
Daughter of a well-to-do Hartford physician, Katharine Hepburn was a member of the Class of 1929 at Bryn Mawr, prefaced her one important Broadway performance in The Warrior’s Husband with four small parts and several unproductive engagements as understudy. Since becoming a celebrity, she has fiercely fought to distinguish between her private and her professional life. Of her education, she says: “I never went to Bryn Mawr—that was another Katharine Hepburn.” Of her husband. Insurance Broker Ludlow Ogden Smith, whom she married Dec. 12, 1928 and with whom she lives in Manhattan at No. 244 East 49th St.,† she says to interviewers: “I am not married and never was.” In Hollywood, Katharine Hepburn lives on a chicken farm with her friend Laura Harding, goes to no parties, calls herself an exhibitionist because she likes to wear overalls to work. When she returns to cinema, she will perform first as Queen Elizabeth, later as Joan of Arc.
In The Loves of Charles II Monologist Cornelia Otis Skinner succeeds in giving something of the color and depth of a full-sized play by threading the six characters she personifies on a single theme. Charles’s women, in Miss Skinner’s contraction of history, included two queens and four trollops. His French mother, Henrietta Maria, had already resigned herself to his random affection for tavern-maids when he appeared at her shabby court in Paris in 1649. On his way back to England and the crown in 1660 Charles stopped long enough to steal a kiss from a Flemish baggage who fleeced him of a diamond ring, 500 guilders and his new lace cuffs. The Jezebel among Charles’s mistresses in England was Barbara Villiers, Lady Castlemaine. whose mouth he finally shut with the title of Duchess of Cleveland. Wrench No. 3 was Louise de Queroalle. Cockney Nell Gwyn surprised her master because she asked for nothing, was more than satisfied when he ennobled their children. Almost contented, Charles turned from her to his queen, Catharine of Braganza, only on his deathbed when he apologized for taking so long to die.
To fashion her one-woman play, which she herself wrote, Monologist Skinner levied on many an Old Master. Each of her six scenes opens with a tableau which suggests or exactly duplicates a painting of the period. The result in color and rhetoric is not unlike one of the swaggering tragi-comedies of the Restoration.
In her youth a skinny, awkward girl, Cornelia Otis Skinner made her stage debut at the age of 14 as “Starving Armenia” without makeup. She studied acting at the Comédie Francaise, wrote a play called Captain Fury which was briefly seen in Philadelphia in 1925 with Otis Skinner, her famed father, in the title role. Before reaching Broadway as a monologist she once heard the chairman of a ladies’ club in Boston tell the audience: “Ladies, we have Miss Skinner with, us today, due to the high price of Admiral Byrd.” By way of contrast to her ambitious The Loves, of Charles II and The Empress Eugenie, she still presents skits like that of the Nebraskan about to be presented at the Court of St. James’s, has added a sharp topical piece called “Lynch Party.” In private life the wife of Broker Alden Sanford Blodgett, she has a three-year-old red-haired son, lives near Helen Hayes in Manhattan’s Gracie Square.
The First Apple (by Lynn Starling; Lee Shubert, producer). When the naive daughter (Irene Purcell) of a fluttering female evangelist allows a garrulous young writer (Conrad Nagel) to seduce her to the music of Brahms in his Greenwich Village flat, she is so ashamed of herself that she becomes engaged to a South Dakota bumpkin devoted less to her than to her mother’s teachings. Aided by a worldly wise aunt (Spring Byington), the writer arranges alliances between the evangelist and her daughter’s fiance, between the daughter and himself. A minor obstacle in the way of able Conrad Nagel’s return from Hollywood to the stage, The First Apple contains such lines as “I am a pagan—so are you,” adds up to a torpid little imitation of Noel Coward.
Yoshe Kalb (by Fritz Blocki and Maurice Schwartz, from a novel by I. J. Singer; produced by Daniel Frohman). From 1880 to 1911, Daniel Frohman was one of Manhattan’s most astute and successful theatrical producers. He started as a mailroom wrapper on the New York Tribune when Horace Greeley owned it, later became advance agent for Callender’s Original Georgia Minstrels. When he started producing for himself, he gave David Belasco his first New York job, as stage manager, Frohman managed the late E. H. Sothern for nearly 25 years, leased the old Lyceum Theatre to house his famed stock company which played in such successes as The Wife, Lord Chumley, The Prisoner of Zenda. He also ran the famed old Madison Square Theatre at which Harry Thaw murdered Stanford White in 1906. His last production was The Seven Sisters in 1911, when he was 60. Since his retirement, he had kept himself occupied by collecting dolls, playing as many as 36 holes of golf in a day, dancing in cabarets until 4 o’clock in the morning and supporting a reputation for scrupulous promptness by carrying two watches. In his elaborate apartment over the Lyceum Theatre he sleeps on the floor because beds give him insomnia. His brother Charles went down on the Lusitania.
Yoshe Kalb was first performed last year in Maurice Schwartz’s Yiddish Art Theatre in lower East Side Manhattan. It prospered when such uptowners as Noel Coward and Jed Harris went to see it, told friends about it. After 82-year-old Daniel Frohman saw it he was so impressed he could not sleep, even on the floor. When later he heard that it had been done into English, he telegraphed Actor-Manager Schwartz: ”May I have the honor to produce it?” Replied Mr. Schwartz: “Yes.”
Yoslie Kalb is a sad story about a Jewish student (Horace Braham) who is seduced by the girl (Erin O’Brien-Moore ) whom a rabbi (Fritz Leiber) wants to marry and spends 15 years wandering about as Joe The Fool (“Yoshe Kalb”). Critics admired bits like a graveyard dance by an idiot girl and a candlelit trial of Joe The Fool for bigamy before 70 rabbis but found the rest dull, pompous, obscurely symbolical. After three nights. Mr. Frohman closed his first production in 22 years with an old man’s sigh of dismay.
*Four weeks after The Lake started its successful London run last March, Co-author Massingham, recovering from influenza and a nervous breakdown, was found dead in a gas-filled room.
†The 1934 edition of the Philadelphia Social Register omits the names of Mr. and Mrs. Ludlow Ogden Smith.
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