The Theatre: New Plays in Manhattan: Sep. 3, 1928

Gang War. Whatever may be Willard Mack’s inadequacies as a playwright, there are seldom, in his opera, those fearful stretches, common in the works of the worst dramatists, in which nothing is happening and nothing seems likely to. His plays are always full of motion and noise which carry with them a crude but undeniable demand for attention. Gang War deals with the adventures of a beer king who is engaged in guerrilla fighting with members of a rival bootlegging concession. Also, he has two frails, of whom one gets quickly killed. So does the beer king and many another. In the last act one gang drops bombs on the other from an airplane, filling the theatre with smoke and confusion. The action—of which there is plenty—is largely laid in the beer king’s den, a place of small tables, gats, a periscope, and other gangish claptrap. Here, in a moment of solicitous passion, one of the beer king’s favorites whispered to a hushed house: “It ull sunds silly of cuss.” That was true.

Relations. One’s cousins, aunts, uncles, nephew’s are one’s relatives; with them one has relations, pleasant or otherwise. Edward Clark, the author of a homely little play, understands neither this nor a great many other things, such as how to be funny and how to be interesting when writing for the stage. The relatives with whom his drama concerns itself are Jewish and unfriendly. Old Wolfe Michaels, who is the kin they love to touch, decides that they, the other offshoots of his stock, are worthless. So does David Lubin, his elegant nephew who arrives from Australia. The clan has become decadent and these two are about to go bankrupt, for some reason, when word arrives that another and hitherto forgotten relative has died in the Antipodes, leaving them a fortune. Thus convinced that blood is a bit thicker than water, the supposedly comic relatives shake hands all around and the play is over.

The Big Pond was written by two astute dramatists, A. E. Thomas (Come Out of the Kitchen, Only 38) and George Middleton (The House of a Thousand Candles, Potty with a Past), husband of Fola La Follette (pioneer Lucy Stoner, daughter of the late Senator “Fighting Bob” La Follette). Their goal was anti-rakish, antiseptic fun, and they achieved it. The heroine is a mid-western lass who hungers for romance and esthetics. In Venice she tumbles for an insolvent Frenchman whose family dates back to Charlemagne, who would innately prefer Santa Maria della Salute to the First Methodist. Her rubber-company father, distressed, arranges to remove the cultured Gaul to Ohio, hoping Daughter will be disillusioned by his Old World fragrance among robustuous U. S. odors. Chameleon Pierre turns Babbitt, nearly estranges the girl while ingratiating himself with her father, ultimately wins her with a recrudescence of Gallic passion when his success is dramatically jeopardized by an American rival. The farce is spotted with easy gags, is occasionally deft, never hysterical. Kenneth MacKenna as Pierre, Lucile Nikolas as Barbara, Harlan Briggs as Father make the most of it, provide an evening of contented chuckling.

Goin’ Home. Negroes make fine figures for the drama. Their emotions, less obscure and tangled than those of Caucasians, are also less controlled. Theirs, too, is a tragic and extraordinary position in a white man’s world. In his admirable play, which won the Longmans, Green Drama League prize, it is this theme, not the entirely black disasters and delights of Porgy, which Ransom Rideout builds upon.

Israel Dubois, a New Orleans blackamoor, has fought bravely through the War in the Foreign Legion. Therefore he gets the notion that he is qualified to marry a pretty French barkeeper, which he does, after romancing to her of his vast estates in the U. S. Not until his old master, Major Edward Powell, stumbles into the café and explains to Lise just what a Negro is, does she understand that her husband has been lying to her.

With mercenary indignation, she goes to bed with the Major in a room above the bar. When he comes out of this room, the Major looks over the banisters at tru café, full of the black soldiers of his regiment, drinking and laughing and watching a Senegalese Negro, who, in red breeches, is dancing, with a knife in his hand.

Here is the big scene. You have been waiting for Major Powell to face his old servant after sleeping with his wife but, using the one-two punch that can be as effective in a play as in a prize-ring, Author Rideout does more than answer his suspense. The prancing Senegalese is a faithful friend to Israel Dubois; seeing that his friend and the officer have bad blood between them, he starts for the Major with his knife, and Israel Dubois, who has drawn gun to shoot his white master, feels the tug of an ancient loyalty and kills his black friend instead.

The play closes weakly enough, neither answering nor emphasizing the problem on which it is constructed. The Major, compelled to recognize his servant as a man, explains the circumstances of the murder to a French official who is full of stagey gallantry. Then, taking Israel Dubois with him, Major Powell starts going home.

There are plenty of flaws in the construction and direction of Goin’ Home—enough, perhaps, to prevent its being the success that its vigor and perception deserve. It seems unfortunate, though it is a minor point, that a black rascal should be required to use so frail an expletive as “he can kiss my foot.” Richard Hale, in blackface, does a sympathetic though slightly sing-song interpretation of Israel Dubois.

The Lido Girl is a monstrosity. It tells about a Greenwich Village filly who inspires a poet to write a book of poems, also a sculptor to make a nude statue, “The Lido Girl.” She then goes around offering herself as inspiration to all and sundry. Finally, leaving a lover panting on the stage, she goes away to Australia.