The Theatre: New Plays In Manhattan: Apr. 29, 1940

Heavenly Express (by Albert Bein; produced by Kermit Bloomgarden). In recent years playwrights have been busy pulling the lids off coffins. Heavenly Express plays along with On Borrowed Time, Death Takes a Holiday, The Fabulous Invalid, Liliom, Outward Bound—this time dressing Death up as a hobo.

The Overland Kid, a stiff who was killed falling off a fast freight, returns to earth as Advance Ticket Taker for the Heavenly Express, a ghost train. Since the Heavenly Express elects to use the tracks of the Santa Fe, it causes quite a commotion in roundhouse circles.

Part of an old hobo legend, the Heavenly Express makes a pleasant theatre fantasy, but Playwright Bein leans on it too heavily as a plot device. He has also treated his fantasy far too coyly. The Overland Kid (John Garfield) dances all over the stage, cavorts on chairs and tables, makes pixie faces and Puckish gestures, behaves like someone who is more at home on a tricycle than in freight cars.

The play comes most alive when it forgets its plot and lets The Overland Kid sing the songs of the road, including such a glimpse of Hobo Heaven as the oldtime hobo song:

Oh, the buzzing of the bees

In the cigarette trees

By the soda-water fountain;

Near the lemonade springs

Where the bluebird sings

In that big rock-candy mountain.

Morning Star (by Sylvia Regan; produced by George Kondolf) gave Yiddish Actress Molly Picon, once the gay “Mitzi of the East Side,” her first English-speaking dramatic role on Broadway. It also turned her into an old woman overnight, made her a grey-haired Jewish mama in one of those sentimental family chronicles which are rigged up each season, in a different racial garb, to catch the family trade.

Playwright Regan’s East-Side saga obeyed every rule. Mama was widowed and warmhearted. One daughter, on the eve of her wedding, perished in a sweatshop fire. Another daughter married a gay blade who carried on with other women. The only son was killed making the world safe for democracy. The kindly boarder (Joseph Buloff) followed Mama around for three acts and 20 years, finally won her elderly hand as the curtain fell. For realism, there was yet another daughter, mean and ornery as they come. For atmosphere, there was an endless amount of Jewish cooking. For laughs, there was a loud but likable radical.

The whole thing was pleasant enough. In fact, if there were not better plays of family life, Morning Star might almost seem real.