Theatre: New Season

Last week two distinguished theatrical estivators, Victoria Regina and Idiot’s Delight, returned to Manhattan. Of sturdier stuff were six other shows (Boy Meets Girl, Dead End, Mulatto, New Faces, On Your Toes, Pre-Honeymoon) which had run straight through the heat and lassitude of a Broadway summer. Mean-time, Three Men On a Horse was entering its third season, Tobacco Road its fourth as the 1936-37 theatre year opened with the presentation of Spring Dance by Philip Barry and two Smith College alumnae. With the possible exception of Anne Nichols’ Pre-Honeymoon, any of the ten survivors of seasons past offered more entertainment value than this unpretentious newcomer.

Spring Dance is concerned with the stratagems of a group of New England college girls trying to make a footloose Yale boy stay home and marry a friend of theirs instead of taking an extended junket to Russia after college. As early as 1927 Eleanor Golden and Eloise Barrangon presented the first version of this romance to a sympathetic audience of classmates at Northampton. Producer Jed Harris got the play three years later, handed it over to his first-string playwright for doctoring five years after that. According to Miss Barrangon, Mr. Barry, the creator of such sophisticated dramas as Paris Bound and The Animal Kingdom, “added a great deal to building up the men characters.” The men characters, all of whom are undergraduates except for a lonely college professor, may not have much maturity, but they are well stocked with charm and witty sayings. To one, for instance, a girl’s college is “a place where they teach the boas to constrict.”

Most notable quality about the girl characters in Spring Dance is their idiom, said to be peculiar to Smith’s Dawes House. To be “smit” is to be in love. A “thicket” is what was formerly known as a necking party. “Plent” signifies pleasant. Critics agreed that Spring Dance is “plent” rather than plausible.