Theatre: New Plays in Manhattan: Dec. 19, 1938

Here Come the Clowns (by Philip Barry; produced by Eddie Dowling) is not, as the title suggests, a lighthearted comedy, but the bitter, twisted story of a modern Job. Sceneshifter Dan Clancy (Eddie Dowling) has been blinded in one eye, has lost his home, his job, his child, and been deserted by his wife. Literally searching for God to find an answer to his sufferings, he stumbles on a group of vaudevillians in a speakeasy. One of them has the sinister talent of worming the truth out of people, and drags from a dwarf and a ventriloquist their tragic, bleeding stories. Appalled by the knowledge of so much other suffering in the world, Clancy momentarily damns the world as evil; then affirms that man, through the exercise of his will, can make the world good.

What is powerful in Here Come the Clowns is not its tricky story nor its Sunday-school philosophy but its ominous, troubled atmosphere. The hypnotic “illusionist,” with his Mephistophelean sense of evil; the hysterical emotions of the dazed people he operates upon; the submerged, intolerable griefs that he forces them to stammer out—these have the kind of horror found in Thomas Mann’s famed story Mario and the Magician. Melodramatic, a little shrill, a little unearthly, Here Come the Clowns is like a grotesque tune played on a broken fiddle.

When Barry attempts to sum up his allegory of good and evil in words, and to affirm man’s redemption through his own powers of godliness, it is all too plainly the author speaking, not the characters. If this summing up is bad because of its clumsy preaching, it is also bad because its very explicitness shatters a mood whose strength lies in its eerie, wordless power of suggestion. Barry’s people, never quite real, can haunt the audience as unhappy spectres; as stock symbols in a morality play, they merely irritate it.

The Author. At 42, with 17 plays behind him, Philip Barry is one of the most unclassifiable of U. S. dramatists. He earned his greatest popularity with such smart comedies as Holiday and Paris Bound. But he is most warmly admired by the elect for an ironic fantasy, White Wings. And he has most thoroughly puzzled and stimulated theatre-goers with his mystical play, Hotel Universe, in its intentions something of a precursor to Here Come the Clowns. Two contradictory kinds of talent are apt to keep Barry from ever becoming a cut-to-measure playwright : on the one hand, a keen eye for manners, a suave wit, a gift for fresh, pointed dialogue; on the other, a restless imagination, great moral heat, a feeling for below-the-surface tragedy.

Born in Rochester, N. Y. of Irish-Catholic parentage, Barry was graduated from Yale in 1918. At Yale he was part of a literary flowering that also included Stephen Vincent Benét, John Farrar, Thornton Wilder. Later Barry enrolled at Harvard in George Pierce Baker’s famed 47 Workshop, went from there to Broadway with his successful Harvard Prize Play, You and I. Married and the father of two young sons, Barry for years lived abroad, now lives in Florida. His good friends include such well-known sophisticates as Robert Benchley, Dorothy Parker, Donald Ogden Stewart. This fall Barry published his first novel, War in Heaven— Here Come the Clowns in fiction form.

Spring Meeting (by M. J. Farrell & John Perry; produced by Gladys & Philip Merivale in association with Lee Ephraim & George Jessel). The season’s first whiff of drawing-room comedy, Spring Meeting is not the usual neat English specimen, but very Irish and a trifle peaty: politely eccentric and richly brogued. The plot deals with getting the better of a crusty old tightwad (A. E. Matthews) who domineers over his crackpot old-maid sister, makes his daughter wear Cousin Maud’s ill-fitting castoffs, forces his family to use the same bath water over & over again. In the end the family completely routs him, scores a number of financial and matrimonial triumphs.

In its more farcical moments, full of whacky antics and loopy Irish wit, Spring Meeting is fun. When the pace slackens and the play exhibits a whimsical snobbery and a fondness for repeating its own jokes, it is not. But in this kind of comedy, acting speaks louder than words; and the acting—particularly Jean Cadell’s, as the woozy old-maid sister—is much of the time first-rate.