Theatre: New Plays in Manhattan: Sep. 10, 1928

Ringside. The writing of “racket” plays has become a racket in itself. This play, the latest in the Fight Game series, improves on many of its predecessors by furnishing a complete set of characters of its own instead of “ad-libbing” from the newspapers. The square jawed hero, for example, is a lightweight instead of the usual heavyweight. He is not a facsimile of Benny Leonard, Sammy Mandell or any other celebrity. He is simply Bobby Murray, a type instead of a borrowed headline. Actor Richard Taber makes the part into a distinct, albeit dull personality. Actor John Meehan does even better, much better, as Peter Murray, iron-grey manager-father.

The plot consists of Father Murray’s struggle to keep Son Murray from “throwing” the championship for the sake of an expert brunette (Actress Suzanne Caubaye) who gets her orders from a masterminded nightclub gangster (Actor Robert Gleckler of Broadway fame). Father Murray has the assistance of an Honest Home Girl (Actress Harriet MacGibbon) and a High-Minded Sportswriter.

As in all such pieces nowadays, the fight-talk, crook-talk and woman-talk is entertaining and inoffensive because it seems to come from the interstices, rather than the undercrust of contemporary society.

The action lolls a bit at first but is sped up handsomely before the finish by a shooting and a whacking good imitation of a prizefight. The play is the work of Edward E. Paramore, Hyaat Daab, and George Abbott, an able and versatile trio. At the first night Tex Rickard was found babbling enthusiastically in the lobby which produced a rumor to the effect that he was backing the show.* Right beside Ringside will open The Big Fight, starring Tex Rickard’s onetime breadwinner, Jack Dempsey, et ux.; thus providing theatre-goers with an example of dramatic coincidence and the opportunity to show whether they prefer a good approximation to the real thing.

Gentlemen of the Press. The second newspaper play to arrive in town this season was immediately subjected to a comparison with the first, The Front Page, which did not thereby lose its position as a headliner. The comparison, though, was interesting for it proved that truth, stranger than fiction, is not as exciting when placed upon the stage. Gentlemen of the Press lacks the hectic, unreal, melodramatic turbulence of the Hecht-MacArthur piece and insomuch it is a more true and a less compelling drama. Ward Morehouse of the dramatic page of the New York Sun wrote it; he should and does know city rooms such as the one in a corner of which his play begins and ends.

It begins when Wick Snell, a laconic newshawk, leaves his job to become a press agent. The next act discovers Public

Relations Counsel Snell, in a chintz and mahogany suite, giving a party for the newspaper boys and abusing his employer. At the end of the play, he is back again in the city room with his feet on a desk and his snout in a telephone. A news rag, one gathers, is as inescapable as a winding sheet; the adherents of the prying profession hate their task but they cannot leave it.

Romance is braided into the plot, not too skillfully. The better moments are those in which reporters are talking about their jobs and their women, or pictured in their drinking or drunken moments. Of the reporters, Hugh O’Connell, who carried the green and flabby reporter’s bible across the stage in The Racket does the best drinking while John Cromwell hands in a properly languid sketch of the cheerless, sardonic Wick Snell, who knows his business well enough to have an even more thorough detestation of the activities it reports. There was observed also in the play a crumpled fellow, who, on the occasions when he turned his front to the audience, generally had his mouth too full to talk. This mousy character was called Bellflower; actually he was Russel Grouse, columnist of the New York Evening Post, making his demure debut on the stage. For the antics of Columnist Grouse all critics had a pretty word to say. Walter Winchell of the New York Evening Graphic called him SourCrouse while the Actor-Journalist’s wife, Alison Smith, able critic for the New York World, paid her husband the neatest compliment of all:

“In the group of minor reporters one figure emerged as dimly familiar. The name, it seems is Grouse. He was greeted by a kindly burst of applause from a warm-hearted audience and he received at least one telegram from a former editor stating (we hope not ambiguously), ‘Your work was unbelievable.’ To this we may add that he gave the best back view of a city newsman ever presented in a ten-line part and in a five-minute big emotional scene with a ham sandwich.”

The Money Lender. When Major Luttrell died he was known to have left a fortune but none knew how he, once so impecunious he had to leave the Army, had amassed £200,000 (convenient symbol for $1,000,000). When the will was read, the startling disclosure came. He had been a moneylender. Anonymously, it is true, but a moneylender nonetheless. As if that were not surprise enough, the will-reading ceremony brought out a twist in the Major’s character, which threatened to disrupt all. A condition of the will: to his daughter Lillian Luttrell he leaves the fortune, providing she marries Samuel Levi, his associate moneylender. Should she refuse to marry Levi, the fortune goes to Levi. Should he refuse to marry her, the fortune goes to her. Knowing not her father’s partner, she was amazed to find him a suave, handsome young Jew, not the portly, oppressive person she pictured. Marriage seemed not impossible. But Samuel loved his cousin Rachel, lovely Semite; Lillian loved Captain Yarborough. The solution of these vexing problems is not in the tawdry fashion of Anne Nichols. Though the play be shot with abortive aphorism, it entertains. Roy

Horniman wrote the piece. An anachronism: accents of the players include thick Yiddish, light Mayfair, stage English, un-aspirated Cockney, none of which sounded entirely authentic.

Caravan. Anyone would have thought that this slow vehicle was a bandwagon instead of a gypsy’s wain, so pompously did it roll along and so bombastic were the sentiments delivered in it. What, one might ask, were the characters full of? They were full of fire and passion. Alza Gaudet, a girl, possessed such magnetism that four men made passes at her. One, a pimp, is carted off to jail; another is stabbed, the third one goes about other business. Even those who have never seen a romantic gypsy melodrama will be able to guess what the fourth suitor does.

Eva the Fifth. In Centralia, Kan., Ed Bondell deserted his frayed and sorry troupe which specialized in Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Little Eva tried to float the company by marrying Newton Wampler, a bromidic individual who, though suspected of wealth, was later bared as an undertaker. Simon Legree then had his turn as actor-manager; he scored a smash and won little Eva back from the mortician. Kenyon Nicholson (The Barker) and John Golden (Lightnin’) wrote the sentimental trifle, in what were apparently their spare and certainly their odd moments. Claiborne Foster was wasted in the leading role.

*Tex Rickard was offered an interest in Abie’s Irish Rose for $7,500. His refusal to participate in this venture, which would have made him more money than any three of his prizefights, is said to have caused in him a desire to be the angel for some play.