Theatre: New Plays in Manhattan: Dec. 9, 1935

First Lady (by Katharine Dayton & George S. Kaufman; Sam Harris, producer). “What I like about Washington,” remarks the hard-bitten wife of an old-time Senator early in this sterling burlesque, “is that everybody is somebody here. That puts gossip on such a high plane.” On a high plane indeed is this low-down on high-ups in the nation’s capital, of the sort that is whispered over a cocktail at the Carlton by someone who got it straight from a secretary at the British Embassy who got it straight from his girl in the Postoffice Department who got it straight from a reporter on the White House run who eavesdropped on a sub-Cabinet member in the Mayflower washroom. Without libeling either Eleanor Medill (“Cissy”) Patterson or Alice Roosevelt Longworth, Playwrights Dayton & Kaufman call them strongly to mind when they pose Irene Hibbard (Lily Cahill) and Lucy Chase Wayne (Jane Cowl) in opposite corners for a three-act social grudge fight. Mrs. Wayne, now the wife of the Secretary of State, was a White House baby when her grandfather was President. She has been “patted on the head by every member of the Party,” is a gracious hostess, an incorrigible meddler in affairs of state and, she happily admits, “a dirty politician.” Irene Hibbard was married to a Balkan prince before a Supreme Court Justice became her husband. For years she and Lucy have fought over freshmen Senators from the West. Now the spoils are nothing less than a Presidential nomination which Lucy almost hands to Irene’s second husband, only to snatch it for her own spouse because of Irene’s first. By now it has become almost a tradition that the New York theatrical season must wait for its annual comedy hit until George S. Kaufman and somebody else get around to writing it. First Lady, as entertaining a show as ever bore the Kaufman hallmark, breaks no tradition. Particularly well cast is big-brown-eyed Actress Cowl, who established herself as one of the U. S. Stage’s great actresses in Within the Law (1912). A Lucy Wayne in her own right, she fits the part like a glove.

Boy Meets Girl (by Bella & Samuel Spewack; George Abbott, producer), opening the night after First Lady, gave Manhattanites the theatre season’s second huge laugh. Having written many a “turkey,” the Playwrights Spewack (Clear All Wires, Spring Song) have come through this time with a ludicrous, but not silly, play about Hollywood which takes up where Merton of the Movies and Once In A Lifetime left off. What gives the show the final gilt-edged touch, however, is the fact that Producer Abbott has cast it with the care and attention a professional diver gives his air hose.

To play the parts of Robert Law and J. Carlyle Benson, scrivening pranksters of the Hecht-MacArthur school, Mr. Abbott has selected Allyn Joslyn and Jerome Cowan. Authoritative indeed is the manner in which this pair wear the buckskin espadrilles, the corduroy trousers and yellow woolen mufflers which make up the stock working clothes of the cinema scenarist. Even more convincing is the way in which Joslyn and Cowan manage to look and act like professional literary cutups.

To play Susie, the waitress who faints as she brings a lunch tray into a story conference because she is “a little pregnant,” Producer Abbott found blonde Joyce Arling. It is Susie’s son, Happy, almost born during the story conference, who gets into the film industry shortly thereafter, motivates without even making a flesh-&-blood appearance most of Boy Meets Girl’s fun.* How Beautiful With Shoes (by Wilbur Daniel Steele & Anthony Brown; Anthony Laudati, producer) has for its hero a college professor (Myron McCormick) who, mad with the idea of beauty, shoots a colleague, flees into the Carolina hills. There he interrupts a marriage between a loutish hillbilly and a fragile, barefooted mountain girl. Wooing the girl with many a mad trope, including the line from the Song of Solomon: “How beautiful are thy feet with shoes,” the lunatic pedagog suddenly finds himself arrested, jailed. Lively as a cricket, he shoots his jailer, sets the courthouse afire, goes looking for the girl again. He finds her on a hilltop just before a drunken posseman finds him, blasts him into eternity with a shotgun.

Many a playgoer will find How Beautiful With Shoes a hodgepodge of demented tommyrot. A few may see in it some of the wild majesty of such great plays of the Irish Renaissance as The Playboy of the Western World or The Unicorn of the Stars.

Whatever Goes Up (by Milton Lazarus; Crosby Gaige, producer) concerns a mild-mannered tobacconist (Ernest Truex) who wins $150,000 in a sweepstakes. Whenever a show starts off with a Caspar Milquetoast suddenly coming into a packet of money, wise spectators settle back in their seats to wait for the dramatic answers to three standard questions: 1) Who is going to try to get it away from him? 2) How are they going to try to do it? 3) How much will they leave him? In the case of Whatever Goes Up, the answers are: 1) a pair of Manhattan sharpers; 2) by the sale of a radio station; 3) $6,000.

Critical verdict : a minuscule, professional comedy acted by a minuscule, professional comedian. Weep for the Virgins (by Nellise Child; group theatre producer) requires a spectator to accept Playwright Child’s initial premise that the facts of life may be withheld from three young women working in a fish cannery. Otherwise he will spend an evening scrutinizing each situation as it goes by, wondering how they can possibly all add up to common sense in the end. Fact is, they do not.

Perhaps any actress, seated in a Shack’s kitchen and wearing a dirty silk kimono, can win an audience’s attention by lamenting in a voice of deepest vulgarity the many servants in her family’s old home, calling God to witness her misery now that she has “lost her voice and her French.” Evelyn Varden in this play does it better than most actresses could. As Cecelia Jobes, she drills into her three daughters the idea that the sex act is an abomination, that they will best serve themselves and their mother by eschewing men. working hard, saving their money so that they can all go to Hollywood one day and be rich and famed. Daughter Violet, after smashing one man with a water bottle, goes off with a fisherman. Plump Daughter Clarice, starving to be a tap dancer, succumbs naturally to a German carpenter and a mess of pork chops. And only after a sailor has left her with a baby does Daughter Ruby peek into her parents’ bedroom, find that her mother was fooling all the time.

*In Boy Meets Girl, Happy appears only in a short cinema sequence. In real life Happy is 6-month-old Judith Ann Roy, daughter of Producer Abbott’s niece.