Theatre: New Plays in Manhattan: Dec. 2, 1935

Mother (adapted by Bert Brecht; Theatre Union, producer). The Red Russians may run their trains off the rails and foolishly crack up their super-airships, but their Revolutionary Theatre, with more than 50 houses filled every night in Moscow and stock companies by the hundreds performing throughout the provinces, is by all odds the world’s most active and inventive. With an imitative eye on its spiritual mother, the Theatre Union has produced Mother, adapted from Maxim Gorky’s novel of an illiterate old woman (Helen Henry)* who, once she gets the hang of things, turns out to be the best Marxist of them all. The play’s subject matter is no more radical than the technique by which it is presented.

Mother is divided into 18 scenes, scenery for which is starkly expressionistic. Visible batteries of lights play on bare drops, while overhead a cinema screen is used to describe the locale or to exhibit significant photographs. In the wings, also visible, are two pianos. These accompany the cast as it sings revolutionary anthems at the conclusion of each episode.

Like most experiments, Mother is thrilling for a while. Along about the sixth scene, however, playgoers indifferent to or agnostic about Communism begin to feel that the production is solemnly, insufferably pretentious, that the narrative of the old woman who loses a son and a husband but still gallantly waves the red flag has not been written up to its exciting possibilities.

Abide With Me (by Clare Boothe Brokaw; Malcolm L. Pearson, Donald E. Baruch, A. H. Woods, producers). Up to last week the meanest, man to walk a Broadway stage in a decade was Stanley Vance, central character of The Dark Tower (TIME, Dec. 4, 1933). Vance, a homosexual sadist, kept white mice in his bedroom, cowed a family living in one of Manhattan’s fine old gloomy mansions, finally sent his poor wife into a trance.

Abide With Me, which provided Manhattan’s most gilded opening of the week, produced a character to challenge Vance for sheer orneriness. He was a psychopathic drunkard called Marsden (Earle Larimore). He did not keep mice in his bedroom but he killed bugs when a boy. He, too, terrified the inhabitants of a gloomy Manhattan mansion. Marsden had been abused by an equally liquorish father when a child, which accounted for the fiendish campaign he put on to terrify his wife (Barbara Robbins) into giving him a son of his own to torture. Since Marsden makes no effort to temper his dangerous lunacy to the other five members of an excellent cast, they all have good reasons for shooting him. In the middle of the last act some one finally does. This event brings relief from much tedious psychiatry and gratifies those spectators who like melodrama.

*In private life, Mrs. Elisha Cook Sr., mother of capable Juvenile Elisha Cook Jr. (Ah, Wilderness!, Crime Marches On).