The Theatre: New Plays in Manhattan: May 13, 1940

Love’s Old Sweet Song (by William Saroyan; produced by The Theatre Guild in association with Eddie Dowling). Opening the night before the New York Drama Critics Circle voted Saroyan’s The Time of Your Life the best play of the season, his Love’s Old Sweet Song gave the verdict a Bronx cheer. An adolescent free-for-all, with characters more like Mexican jumping beans than people, Love’s Old Sweet Song is a travesty on many things, including the art of William Saroyan.

The play tells of an old maid (Jessie Royce Landis) who gets involved in a dippy romance with a patent-medicine salesman (Walter Huston). In the midst of her flutterings, a vast family of Okies calmly moves in on her and refuses to budge. After much ado, the old maid’s house burns down and everybody makes for the residence of a Greek wrestler, where the Spirit of Love triumphs immoderately.

In Love’s Old Sweet Song Saroyan has abandoned his boozy lyricism in favor of boyish pranks. A few of the pranks—including a visit to the Okies of something that does not exist—a traveling “college boy” subscription salesman for TIME—are quite funny. So are bits of the dialogue. But the play as a whole confuses bounce with brashness, hews to no comedic line, and eventually becomes as tiresome as a precocious child whose parents let him show off long past bedtime.

“There Shall Be No Night” (by Robert E. Sherwood; produced by The Playwrights’Company and The Theatre Guild). In a timely and indignant mood Robert Sherwood has dramatized the story of the invasion of Finland. He has dramatized it simply, in terms of what happens to one Finnish family—a Nobel-Prize-winner, his U. S.-born wife, their youthful son. There is not very much action, most of the play consists of speeches—some of them eloquent, some inflammatory, some confused.

Kaarlo Valkonen (Alfred Lunt) is a scientist strongly opposed to war. But when war comes on the terms it does, Valkonen abandons his pacifism, turns down a chance to leave Finland, and goes, like his patriot son, to be killed. His wife (Lynn Fontanne) stays also, prepared to defend her home, but she compels her daughter-in-law, who is expecting a child, to flee the country.

Despite the seeming optimism of his title, Sherwood provides no pick-me-up for audiences with headline hangovers. Through the Finnish gloom, Sherwood sees no light of imminent world salvation. He only argues, rather vaguely, that because glamor and heroics have at last gone out of war, men are that much closer to understanding war’s horrors, and so ending them.

But if not overoptimistic, Sherwood is militant. His pacifist who, after studying the issues at stake, decides to fight can easily be taken as a symbol: Sherwood might well wish an anti-war U. S. to change its mind as Valkonen did. Although denying Columnist Raymond Clapper’s accusation that his play is a plea for intervention, Sherwood admitted that he expected to be called a “warmonger.”

Though forceful acting by Alfred Lunt & Lynn Fontanne bolsters up the play, it is actually much more sincere than skillful. It is not Sherwood’s art, but the audience’s apprehensiveness, that gives “There Shall Be No Night” its grim interest. During periods of world upheaval, an inspired dramatist can sometimes be surpassed by a simple rewrite man.