The Theatre: New Plays: Jan. 26, 1925

Two Married Men. In one brilliant burst of writing, Vincent Lawrence has sliced wide for inspection a bitter, all too prevalent tragedy. For no reason at all except that they are five years married and that she loves suddenly another man, a wife tires of her husband. This she must tell him, hating herself therefor, yet powerless before the fact. Tomorrow she will run away.

She does not run away. In conclusion, the play lumps badly. For two opening acts of wrangling domestic comedy, in which another family splits over the same man, it amuses only mildly. Yet for this third-act thrust, it stamps itself upon the season as significant.

Cast and production are competent. Two relatively unknown players, Minor Watson and Ann Andrews, give promise of important futures in that final act which they play from first to last uninterrupted on the stage.

Processional. The Theatre Guild, having this season produced two gross financial (and artistic) successes,* resolutely entered its laboratory and emerged with the findings of a wild experiment. The play is an effort in American expressionism by John Howard Lawson, called a “jazz symphony of life” and seems at last a somewhat hazy reference to Joyce’s Ulysses.

Justly bewildered observers resented the incoherence of the narrative. Dug from the worried contents as best it can be, it is this: A miner in a West Virginia coal town breaks jail. He bayonets a soldier of the invading companies sent to subdue strike disturbances by martial law. Pursued, he finds momentary safety in a mine shaft and there assaults a little Jewish maiden. He is captured, blinded, hanged. His mother, the girl and her father are clutched by the Ku Klux, rescued by agitators. The murderer returns sightless and amalgamates himself with the girl, about to be a mother, in a jazz wedding ceremony.

Throughout the whole rasps the strains of a jazz orchestra. Much of the dialog is written in the jumpy idiom of jazz. The several scenes are mostly bizarre paintings on flat drops. Exits and entrances are made from the orchestra pit. Even the stage-door alley beside the auditorium is employed for off-stage movements of the noisy mob.

The language, the reference to normally unmentioned matters and certain of the incidents are unsparingly explicit. Some of the acting is good, none of it bad. June Walker, amusing actress of many a jingling farce (Six Cylinder Love, The Nervous Wreck,) poured out tears for the first time before an audience. She doubled her reputation by the searching sadness of her little animal, the heroine.

Clearly, to understand this frenzied fable is impossible. Beyond that, two reactions are discernible in the audience. Most of it is irritated and resentful. The minority is excited, savagely amused and deeply grateful that from this formless experiment the Guild has translated some of the stubborn emotional symbols with which the hidden history of American life tells of truth.

Stark Young—'”Astonishing suggestions of living stuff; full of strong, wounded, indomitable life.”

Alexander Woollcott—.”A play that the Guild should be respected for producing and the playgoer pardoned for avoiding.”

Shall We Join the Ladies? and Isabel. James M. Barrie started to write a three-act play, wound his web of circumstance so tightly that even he could not escape it and gave the result to the world as a one-act questionmark. Thirteen people are sitting at a fashionable dinner table, their host informs them one of their number has murdered his brother two years before in Monte Carlo. He will solve the mystery that evening. The playwright proceeds to shift the needle of suspicion adroitly around the circle. With everyone implicated, a woman screams off-stage and the curtain falls. Ingeniously constructed and fairly well played, the play impresses one chiefly as a vigorous “stunt.”

Isabel is a drawing-room comedy on which all the well-worn adjectives of “deft,” “light,” “clever” and, above all, “smart” can be conscientiously projected. It tells of a vague professor, his pretty wife, their most attractive visitor. The visitor argues expertly with all of them how he can seduce her and yet remain a gentleman. The dialog, particularly in the opening act, shines among the most brilliantly inconsequential of the season. Margaret Lawrence is the star and ably so, although her part contains no such opportunities as those written by the author and glibly realized by Leslie Howard, the lover, and Edna May Oliver, the grim and caustic aunt. On the whole, the play seems the most important trifle of the season.

Alexander Woollcott— [“Isabel] suave, inconsiderable, urbane and delightfully acted. [Shall We Join the Ladies?] a tour de force in theatrical tension.”

Chauve-Souris. Since Nikita Balieff and his resourceful Russians long ago proved themselves unique in the amusement world, there is very little to add to their, encomiums except to say that their new show is traditionally diverting. With the familiar exceptions of the Wooden Soldiers and Katinka the rotund regisseur has provided an entirely new bill. Some scribes noticed that the easy influences of prosperity in London, Paris and New York had robbed the entertainment of its bitter flashes from the heart with which the Russians first punctuated their production. The new display is smoother, more suave and neatly polished. One or two of the episodes are pretty dull; the rest are rippling with naive and ingenious entertainment. And Balieff’s English is no better than ever.

Heywood Broun—”. . . the miracle of seeming altogether new and somewhat wonderful.”

The Piker Alternately shouting and sniveling his, way through the role of a cheap little chap who stole $50,000 by mistake for $50, Lionel Barrymore has done one of those things which he ought not to have done. Though its idea is novel and some of its writing grittily amusing, the piece is as cheap as its hero. The play reverses the financial process. It started out to tell $50,000 worth of drama and turned out a $50 value.

Leeches quickly gather on the stolen banknotes. Bucket-shops get $20,000; a crooked boy friend gets a year’s living; an immensely worthless chorus girl gets the rest. Gone the money, gone the chorus girl. In one wild effort to convince her that he is a man of daring, he summons the police and tells them of the theft. They won’t believe him. Everything gone—even his pitiful hope of one day’s fame across the scarlet headlines of the gum-chewers’ sheetlets.

Mr. Barrymore, overacting, became monotonous. Better performances were offered by Adrienne Morrison as the bucket-shop decoy and particularly by Alan Brooks, expensive boy friend.

The Valley of Content. Marjorie Rambeau, one of the few actresses to have played a one-night stand on Broadway (TIME Jan. 28, 1924), returned last week in a trashy tale of scrambled emotions that all turned out to be a dream. Possibly the playwright can be pardoned some of the incoherence because it was a dream. She probably will not be pardoned. Sorrowing mother, dancing children, shots and harlotry—all the old devices of the thriller thump their weary way across the stage. All this to prove that existence in the country is safer than existence in the city. Miss Rambeau gave a generally distinctive performance which only served to impress upon the audience the skinny values of the play.

The Love Song. A size 15, EE operetta set itself up at the Century under the guidance of the Messrs. Shubert and managed to entertain its audience considerably. Hundreds of people and masses of scenery do not lend themselves to subtlety. The Love Song is not subtle. But it supplies full money’s worth.

The story is based on the life of the composer Offenbach and his attachment for the Empress Eugenie. On this framework, a generous interpolation of fancy and invention has been hung. As narrative, the production is naturally negligible; it develops some humor and immense opportunity for scenery and singing. Taste and dollars have made the sets just about the most gorgeous series of pictorial effects in town. An able vocal assembly, headed by Dorothy Francis, swings melodiously through a score based on the best works of the play-hero Offenbach.

* The Guardsman and They Knew What They Wanted.