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Theatre: New Plays in Manhattan: Dec. 16, 1929

5 minute read
TIME

The Living Corpse. In Moscow, toward the end of the 19th Century, it was a gypsy singer, her grave gypsy songs, and the sultry, southern wines which drew Fedya Protasov away from his home and a sweet wife who tried helplessly to forget him. But Fedya, despite his weak lips and wanton tastes, was not the total wreckage that he seemed. For one thing, he never took advantage of the passion innocently offered him by his beloved Masha, the gypsy. For another, he never told lies, so that rather than commit the wholesale falsification necessary to give his wife a divorce, he pretended to kill himself (he was not brave enough for real suicide) so that she could marry a devoted, comfortable suitor. When Fedya’s ruse was discovered years later and he learned that, depending on the courts, he had either to remarry his wife or be exiled with her to Siberia for bigamy, he did find the courage to shoot himself.

In other words, Fedya is a great character, a coiled complex of frailty and nobility, such as his creator Tolstoy and that other great Russian, Dostoievsky, were particularly apt to conceive. As acted by Jacob Ben-Ami and a large company of Eva Le Gallienne’s Civic Repertory Theatre (including a witty bit by the directress herself), most of the values of this celebrated tragedy are apparent. Egon Brecher’s depiction of Alexandrov, an artistic hobo with delusions of grandeur, is an uproarious triumph if you can overlook its tragic perspectives.

Mr. Ben-Ami prefers understatement. When it is necessary for him to lie in vinous stupor on a couch, he forms no such abandoned arabesques with his body as did John Barrymore, who acted an adaptation of this play (Redemption) several years ago. Deliberate, warm, avoiding histrionism. the current Fedya invites comparison rather with the splendid performance given by the famed German actor Alexander Moissi during last year’s visit to Manhattan.

Whirlpool, in which handsome Edward Leiter represented a small town pastor’s struggle against sex, capital and gossip, closed after three performances. It was earnest and trite. Most of its potential public were busy with Christmas shopping.

The Amorous Antic. Harlow Balsam (Frank Morgan) is engaged in writing a play which incorporates such progressive features as a girl on a bicycle and a bishop, both nude, but appearing in total darkness. His wife Sena (Phoebe Foster) is painting a geometrical portrait of Percival Redingote (Alan Mowbray) who, in turn, is about to carve a bust of Sena. Because Miss Foster is a brittle beauty, Mr. Morgan an absurd farceur, and Jo Mielziner, who designed the scenery, knows how to burlesque the futuristic trend, this satire on ultra-modern estheticism by Novelist Ernest Pascal (The Marriage Bed) has its memorable moments. What the quaint older generation would have called a love affair occurs to Sena and Percival. To them it is merely a biological barb which can be plucked out in one assignation, leaving them to work in peace and with increased artistic comprehension of each other. But Husband Harlow, acting like an old fogy, objects to even one evening of adultery on his wife’s part. Naturally, she had told him her plans.

Playwright Pascal makes it humorously clear that his subjects talk so interminably about sex that their actions are a self-conscious mockery. Unfortunately his dialog, which gets off to a smart start and upon which the play depends, becomes banal and repetitious.

Headquarters. William Farnum, whose pompadour, jaw and chest expansion were once what all the young ladies of the time covertly admired, is currently to be seen on Broadway, mature, heavy, but stillindubitably heroic. As a police inspector he is forced to inquire into the double murder of his own wife and her paramour. For a while suspicion falls on Mr. Farnum’s daughter (by an earlier marriage), but this pretty thing is no more a murderess than she seems. When the case has been solved, you are left with two striking thoughts: 1) A convenient and unusual thing to have behind the false wall of a private vault is the boudoir of your mistress; 2) very mysterious shooting may be accomplished by planning to have the bullets, instead of striking directly, bounce off some such household object as achandelier, umbrella stand or commode. Playwright Hugh Stanislaus Stange’s thriller will appeal to small boys, but perhaps they had better not be allowed to see Miss Florence Johns’s harrowing portrayal of a dope fiend.

Top o’ the Hill. The hill referred to is that from which San Francisco’s substantial families survey the Golden Gate. On its upper slopes a social scion (Lester Vail) becomes engaged to a cinemactress (Katherine Wilson) who, unknown to him, has climbed the hill from a bordello. Seven years have done much to make her forget that dark vale, but when she meets the most aggressive of her former swains, he nearly sends her hurtling down again. Failing that, he forces her to tell her history to her fiance. You are very much afraid that the pleasant fellow will overlook the girl’s bad past, which is exactly what he does.

This is particularly unfortunate, for Playwright Charles A. Kenyon makes the girl’s vacillation between bawdry and respectability a very real and painful thing, and suggests that desperation might cause her to run away. Indeed, had she returned to her earlier lover, the denouement might have been more convincing than it is now, for Charles D. Brown gives him rough-cut, magnetic aspect.

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