The Theatre: New Plays in Manhattan: Oct. 15, 1934

Continental Varieties (Arch Selwyn and Harold B. Franklin, producers) smoothly exhibits a group of European music-hall celebrities, performing, one by one. their tony specialties. Dressed in blue velvet, perched dramatically on a piano, Lucienne Boyer sings her Parisian torch songs (TIME, Oct. 8). Vicente Escudero clicks his Spanish heels, cas tanets and fingernails, accompanied by a troupe of wriggling gypsies. A fat, sad-faced Russian named Raphael makes a concertina, scarcely larger than a sausage, whisper like a violin. A magician named De Roze refreshes his audience by pouring, from a pitcher which appears to con tain pure water, small sniffs of whiskey, benedictine, gin, tomato juice or absinthe. Between turns, bland oldtime Nikita Balieff makes impudent speeches in the “English lahngwidge.”

Lucienne Boyer went straight on to another opening, even more elegant and gala, The Rainbow Room, on the 65th floor of Rockefeller Center’s RCA Building. First client to arrive was John D. Rockefeller Jr. who supplied some of the cash for The Rainbow Room’s glass walls, color organ and two-speed reversible, revolving dance floor. At a table in an alcove farthest from the dance floor, Mr. & Mrs. Rockefeller and their guests — Mr. and Mrs. Nelson Rockefeller, Mr. & Mrs. John D. Rockefeller III—were half way through the club’s $15 dinner before the other frolickers started to arrive. Most night-club entrepreneurs are bored by their own productions. Said John D. Rockefeller Jr.: “You don’t know how glad I was to be able to get a reservation.”*

The First Legion (by Emmet Lavery; Bert Lytell and Phil Green, producers). The scene is a House of the Society of Jesus, the bare cubicles of the Fathers, the Gothic arches and mullioned windows of the Community Room. The characters, like those in prison and wartime plays, are all male.

Without women, the plot nags at the theological doubts of two younger Fathers. Suddenly all doubts vanish when a miracle seems to have cured a Father who has had paralysis. But the doubts reappear, concentrated in the person of the hero (Bert Lytell), when he learns under the secrecy of the confessional that the miracle was no miracle but only a case of courage induced by a happy dream. Since the Father Rector (William Ingersoll) has designated him to plead the case for the “miracle” and the canonization of the house’s founder at Rome, Bert Lytell’s faith is all but destroyed. Finally, a boy with a paralyzed leg “miracle,” is thus cured by his producing a faith in second the first and authentic miracle, restoring Lytell’s faith and the case for canonization.

The First Legion presents a delicate subject nearly unique in the theatre, with intelligence, humor and moderation, despite its absolute acceptance of Catholic dogma. Manhattan critics—Protestant or Jewish or nothing—found it “too much exalted talk,” “a sombre evening’s repose.” Later audiences were less supercilious and to them Mr. Lytell made curtain speeches voicing his faith that “there is a place on Broadway for such a play as The First Legion.”

The title refers to the Jesuits’ role as “the shock troops of God.”

Divided by Three (by Margaret Leech Pulitzer and Beatrice Kaufman; Guthrie McClintic, producer) was written to make room for the superb abilities of smoldering Judith Anderson. It borrows the plot of Eugene O’Neill’s Strange Interlude and puts Miss Anderson back in the role she enormously enjoyed for a year. In Divided by Three again she is divided by: 1) her aggressive middle-aged lover (James Rennie); 2) her incredibly unsuspecting putterer of a husband; 3) her son (James Stewart). She finds it desirable and, until the second act curtain, possible to accept all three simultaneously.

It is her son who learns of her adultery, through the kindly offices of his priggish fiancee. As priggish as she, he calls his mother a whore and withdraws his love from both mother and fiancee. The last act allows everyone (still except the husband) to become readjusted to the situation. The son still feels that adultery is wrong; his mother is still determined to have what she wants. But just as she decides to come clean and divorce her husband, he comes home with the news that he has been wiped out in the stock market. Like the noble character she is, she drops the divorce plans. Her lover, after a minute’s anguish, decides after all to stay for dinner.

Only Judith Anderson makes this implausible story a moving and challenging affair. She bats her heavy-lidded eyes, settles her welterweight shoulders and makes her audience feel that something important is happening. Noteworthy are Donald Oenslager’s handsome settings.

More newsworthy than their first play are Divided by Three’s authors.

Margaret Leech Pulitzer is the second wife of that studious, shy Ralph Pulitzer whom newspapermen have never forgiven for letting his late great father’s New York World be sold, and whom they howled out of accepting the post of administrator of the NRA newspaper code.

Beatrice Bakrow Kaufman is the wife of Playwright George S. Kaufman (Of Thee I Sing, Once in a Lifetime, Dinner at Eight, Merrily We Roll Along), who lives on meat and chocolate peppermints, talks to himself on the street and is on the administration committee of the NRA theatre code.

Both Mrs. Pulitzer and Mrs. Kaufman are ringleaders of Manhattan’s first-nighting, croquet-playing, waggish literary-theatrical-social set. Mrs. Pulitzer has a two-year-old daughter; Mrs. Kaufman has a nine-year-old daughter. Mrs. Pulitzer graduated from Vassar, has written three competent novels, hates bridge, likes travel. Mrs. Kaufman quit Wellesley after a year, quit the University of Rochester to marry Mr. Kaufman. She is convinced she is No. 1 woman croquet player of the U. S.

Last week Manhattan critics tried to like their friends’ first play but only half of them succeeded.

Spring Freshet (by Owen Davis; Lee Shubert. producer). The voluble, acidulous, rickety old maid-of-all-work (Elizabeth Patterson) who has worked for the Levensellers for 20 years has learned to regard them with a fishy eye. Of Judge Levenseller, who has acquired a reputation for wisdom on the bench, she says: “He had an impediment in his speech when he was a boy, and by the time he got over it he was real looked up to.”

The Levensellers are an inbred, ingrown family inhabiting a town on Maine’s Penobscot River. Their toes are kept on the line by a hidebound old matriarch determined that the family shall stay fit to inherit the Levenseller name and worldly goods. The grandson (Richard Whorf) is compelled to marry the Judge’s daughter, though he loves another cousin (Francesca Bruning) who is also loved by still another cousin (Owen Davis Jr.). In the end the old lady has no ultimate heir in sight except her grandson’s illegitimate child.

One play (Too Many Boats’) by prolific Owen Davis has already appeared and vanished this season, and a third is in rehearsal. Spring Freshet is not likely to increase Mr. Davis’ reputation for competent writing, and on the stage it is burdened with a singularly wooden performance by Francesca Bruning (One Sunday Afternoon). But the play is never dull when Elizabeth Patterson is mouthing homely nuggets of New England wisdom.

*In Cambridge, England last week, students inspected for the first time a new University Library built with £750,000 of good Mr. Rockefeller money. In Manhattan, plans were filed for a $1,500,000 eight-story addition to the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research.