The Theatre: Approved by Experts

Last week a play was produced in one prison while its author languished in another. At Sing Sing, Taken from Life unwound through 22 scenes, involved a murder defendant whose guilt or innocence the audience was pointedly asked to judge. In Tombs Prison in Manhattan, Playwright Arthur Chalmers, also charged with murder, still had ahead of him the verdict of a more orthodox jury.

A former mounted policeman, Playwright Chalmers for many years did duty on Manhattan’s theatre-crammed 45th Street. He loved stage folk, let stars park their cars overtime so long as he got their autographs. Last August, after a hospital maid he had allegedly been friendly with was found dead by a roadside, he was yanked off his glamorous beat.

Locked up in the Tombs, with 45th Street still in his blood, Chalmers wrote Taken from Life. Last month, at Brooklyn’s Academy of Music, it had its premiere. When guns refused to go off, bottles refused to pour, and the melodrama became increasingly witless, the audience started to snicker and laugh. The play dragged on so long that its last six scenes had to be cut because the stagehands wanted to go home. At Sing Sing, where going home is more of a problem, the audience was far more patient and sympathetic, hated to have to stop for dinner. When the moment came to judge the defendant, the prisoners shouted a vociferous “Not Guilty,” were rewarded with a happy ending instead of the electric chair.

Producer Chamberlain Brown announced after the Brooklyn flop, again last week after the Ossining triumph, that he intended to take Taken from Life to Broadway.