1939: Drama

Long-run Successes.

New Year's Eve 1938 playgoers discovered a wide choice in which were included several productions already popular successes since early in that year. Bachelor Born, What a Life, and Clare Booth's malicious Kiss the Boys Good-bye, continued lengthy runs into 1939, as did the musical I Married an Angel. The vaudeville antics of Hellzapoppin' were to maintain it on the boards throughout the year, along with the more 'socially conscious' and more intelligently comic Labor revue, Pins and Needles, into which its sponsors introduced from time to time new skits and fresh songs in response to the turn of events — in 1939, for example, a burlesque on the C.I.O.-A.F. of L. rift in which Labor's children, the offspring of Lewis and Green, chorus: 'Papa Don't Love Mama Any More.' Pins and Needles was destined to outlive its two more pretentious rivals, each with a long run to its credit — the sprightly and tuneful Boys from Syracuse, and that ornate vehicle for the hot-and-hearty Sophie Tucker and the wry-humored Victor Moore, Leave It to Me.

Possibly the finest dramatic work of the previous season, Robert Sherwood's Abe Lincoln in Illinois marked in October, 1939, its first anniversary on Broadway. Richard Gaines took over the title part when Raymond Massey departed to make the Hollywood version of the play, and a financially unfavorable experiment which nevertheless had its useful implications took place when the Playwrights Producing Company moved the piece to a new theater, and reduced its admission scale from a three- to a one-dollar top. Jo Mielziner, whose elaborate settings had been taken by the road company on tour, redesigned the production, eliminating walls and ceilings and reducing the scenery to a few chairs and tables, a fireplace and indispensable properties — the whole a far more imaginative milieu for the players than the original mis-en-scène had been. At the new prices, a new audience was stimulated to attend, as had been the case with the Federal Theater. Had Abe Lincoln in Illinois not been of such a nature as to require an unusually high 'overhead,' this venture into popular theater might well have brought its authors financial as well as moral satisfaction.

Odets' Rocket to the Moon, played by the Group Theater's extraordinary acting ensemble, likewise carried over into 1939. The metaphysically inclined continued to praise and to attend Philip Barry's Here Come the Clowns, and to welcome the revival, after fifteen years, of Sutton Vane's curious Outward Bound, in which a boatload of ghosts voyage toward the hereafter, among them an appealing old charwoman, Mrs. Midgit. Laurette Taylor joined an all-star cast to play Mrs. Midgit with a tremulous and ingratiating charm. Hardiest of its kind, Tobacco Road entered its sixth year with every sign of inexhaustible longevity.

Musical Shows.

Musical shows, if no more distinguished than in previous years, seemed slightly more numerous. Noel Coward wrote Set to Music, in which Beatrice Lillie displayed her skill in clowning to audiences more than half prepared by previous acquaintance to find her performance amusing; and Richard Haydn made one of the season's hits with his monologue as Mr. Carp, the gentleman who imitates fish. Stars In Your Eyes depended upon the strenuous knockabout farcing of Jimmie Durante, and his hoarse dislocations of the English language. This prolonged vaudeville skit retailed what happens in a Hollywood studio; Ethel Merman sang in it. Tamara Toumanova danced, and Jo Mielziner contributed ingenious settings. The Shubert revue called The Streets of Paris exploited the songs of a newcomer, Carmen Miranda, and the more familiar talents of Bobby Clark and Luella Geer. From Vienna might never have seen the footlights, but for the material and moral support which sympathetic persons in the American theater gave to this modest and delightful entertainment by exiled actors and actresses calling themselves The Refugee Artists Group. Likewise intimate, and even more exotic, was Mexicana, a rather short-lived revue sponsored by the Mexican Government's Department of Fine Arts. The more raucous native touch was in Yokel Boy, whose melodies were excellent, whose 'book' was execrable, and whose chief performers were Judy Canova and Buddy Ebsen. Other luxurious entertainments were found to balance somewhat precariously on the none too substantial talents of a single comedian: Willie Howard as 'Max Perisphere,' struggled heroically with the dead weight of many pages in George White's Scandals; despite the clowning of the Wiere Brothers. Imogene Coca's imitation of Carmen Miranda was about all that kept the customers faithful to the Straw Hat Revue. George Abbott produced a better-than-average show, however, in Too Many Girls, the action of which took place in Pottawatomie, a New Mexico college town amusingly brought to life in the settings of Mielziner. To such clever songs by Rodgers and Hart as 'Spic and Spanish,' a group of young and reasonably skillful singers and dancers drew fresh amusement from the old 'college humor' type of entertainment. What Rodgers and Hart did for Too Many Girls, Jerome Kern's deft score did for an Oscar Hammerstein musical entitled Very Warm for May, a production which also had the advantage of Minelli's smart and resourceful designing in sets and costumes. Bert Lahr's clowning as a romantic wash-room attendant who dreams he is Louis Fifteenth, Betty Grable's dancing, and Ethel Merman's crisp rendition of such Cole Porter tunes as 'Katie Went to Haiti,' enlivened one of the year's most briskly vulgar revues, Du Barry Was a Lady. After a year and a half of rehearsing, and much advance discussion, the New York Federal Theater's self-spoofing revue, Sing for Your Supper, finally raised its curtain. At least one of its numbers, 'Papa's Got a Job,' went below the surface level of most revue matter; most of the show's fun was at the expense of the Projects themselves. Rather more like a private entertainment by a group of talented young guests at a week-end party than a full-fledged Broadway 'attraction,' Nancy Hamilton's pert and clever One For the Money caught on after several weeks of slim patronage, and was recognized for the modestly amusing evening it was, with humorous good taste in the direction by John Murray Anderson, the settings of Raoul Pene du Bois, and the sly impersonations by Miss Hamilton herself. Within a month two 'swing' versions of Gilbert and Sullivan's Mikado came to town. The first was by the Chicago Federal Theater Project, and called itself The Swing Mikado. Its action, transferred to a South Sea Island whose inhabitants wore most un-Victorian costumes, throbbed and pounded with cakewalks and with shagging which somehow caught the spirit of the original, and captivated even the most loyal devotees of D'Oyly Carte. And Savoyards had their second shock when the unique Billy Robinson expressed his 'object all sublime' not with his voice but with his miraculous feet, in The Hot Mikado which Michael Todd produced, and for which Nat Karson devised brilliantly mad costumes. Katisha crooned, and Robinson played the Mikado in gold pants and a gold derby hat, to the delight of Broadway, and subsequently of visitors of the World of Tomorrow. For a few evenings in March, one could see the original side by side with its jazzed version; the D'Oyly Carte troupe was then concluding its annual season in America.

Encouraged by the two jitterbug versions of a classic, Benny Goodman proceeded to swing Shakespeare. The Bottom of Swingin' the Dream, Louis Armstrong, wears the red shirt and varnished helmet of a fireman, and blows a hot trumpet. For no logical reason, the peasantry and fairies of the Midsummer Night's Dream, played by a Negro-white cast, inhabit New Orleans at the close of the last century, and romp with much syncopation and considerable good-natured frenzy through a piece which is more swing than Shakespeare, more Goodman than Mendelssohn.

Midway between musical shows and the severities of grand opera lay two folk operettas produced on the same bill by The American Lyric Theater, The Devil and Daniel Webster, with a source in Stephen Vincent Benèt's short story, and Susanna, Don't You Cry, based on Stephen Foster's melodies. Both were appraised as none too successful experiments.

Nothing but the most gigantic of spectacles can fill either the stage or the auditorium of the great Center Theater, but The American Way did both. It was written by George S. Kauffman and Moss Hart as a succession of resounding episodes with much patriotic appeal of a genuine if sentimental quality. A German immigrant lands at Ellis Island; he makes a life for himself in an American town so shrewdly reproduced on the stage that thousands recognize it as typical. He grows old, and his children experience, as he had, the exciting and memorable times in the recounting of which Kauffman and Hart bring to life forty years of our history. The authors know how to appeal both to pride and to nostalgia in scenes like the McKinley and Bryan Rallies, the Fourth of July celebration, or the return of the boys from 'Over There.' The American Way was painted with a large and sweeping brushstroke. Its settings, by Donald Oenslager, were authentic and impressive. When bands, crowds and noise were not in possession of the stage, Fredric March and Florence Eldridge played the two chief parts with incisive skill. Comparison with earlier manifestations of Americanism in the theater caused this one to receive praise on its own merits.

Comedies.

To be classified as entertainment were four pieces whose premières came during the first few weeks of 1939. Out of Victoria Lincoln's novel, February Hill, Buckner and Hart drew the bawdy and high-humored scenes of The Primrose Path, and provided Helen Westley another opportunity to play one of her crackling old ladies. Dodie Smith, whose pleasant if rather unexciting comedy of English family life, Call It a Day, had been the mild success of a previous season, produced in Dear Octopus a second group of characters who had much of the charm, and some of the vaguely stereotyped quality of the first comedy, played in this case by actors as skilled in their craft as Lillian Gish and Lucille Watson. Spring Meeting and Mrs. O'Brien Entertains were successful and amusing aids to one's digestion of dinner. Lacking the suitable degree of smooth artificiality, a revival of Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest failed, in spite of the talents and good intentions of Estelle Winwood, Hope Williams and Clifton Webb. I Must Love Someone was a period farce of the Floradora days, with Nancy Carroll in the chief role, written by Jack Kirkland and Leyla George.

Later in the year, the list of laugh-provokers was increased by three offerings. A George Abbott farce always combines absurd situations with ludicrous character, hectic activity, and wise-cracking dialogue; See My Lawyer was typically Abbott, retailing the adventures of a semi-lunatic young man of immense wealth who has fallen into the hands of three lawyers in search of a client. Much of the mirth in its performance was to be credited to those old hands at knockabout, Milton Berle and Teddy Hart. Life With Father dealt with the tempests in a family teapot, the family whose presiding genius the late Clarence Day so vividly brought to life in his novel. The adaptors were Russell Crouse and Howard Lindsay, the latter of whom provided a richly three-dimensional portrait of Father, furiously indignant upon occasion, and fundamentally affectionate and dependable; Dorothy Stickney as understandingly played the wife. Paul Osborn's mild and fresh-humored Morning's At Seven was smoothly handled by Russell Collins, Herbert Yost, Dorothy Gish and Effie Shannon. Clare Booth's Margin for Error re-affirmed her talent for corrosive dialogue, her ability to picture the odious and the contemptible with the acid-bitten lines of an etcher. It is an anti-Nazi comedy; one of its characters is a German consul whose offices are being protected by a Jewish policeman; the later scenes are developed as a murder mystery with a melodramatic atmosphere. Sam Levene was superbly comic as Officer Finkelstein in a play which did not fulfil the promise of its first act. A bitter tang likewise pervaded Foreigners, in which Frederick Lonsdale, expert fabricator of parlor comedies, set the representatives of various nationalities to wrangling on a desert island, and failed to make their quarrels either amusing or instructive.

The spectacle of gifted players wasted on poor dramatic material was revealed in the case of Helen Hayes, Philip Merivale, and Katharine Cornell. Miss Cornell was joint producer, with the Playwrights Company, of S. N. Behrman's No Time for Comedy, and played a part which demanded far less than her full powers. Easily, charmingly and with unerring effectiveness she enriched the role of Linda Esterbrook whose playwright husband is the victim of a Lorelei with a passion for developing the 'latent powers' of other women's husbands. Laurence Olivier over-played the distraught hero, and Robert Fleming the inevitable Behrmanesque commentator. The author's talent for crisp dialogue, as shown in a series of conversation pieces, does not always compensate for unoriginal situations and recurrent plots. Equally trivial matter was contained in Ladies and Gentlemen, in which Helen Hayes transformed the commonplace character she played. The plot, which deals with a jury locked up to find its verdict in a murder case, and an office girl who falls in love with a staid fellow-juryman, was derived from a play by Ladislaus Bus-Fekete, and was rather roughly handled in its adaptation by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur. Miss Hayes and Mr. Merivale succeeded in making something out of practically nothing by suggesting values which had not been written into their parts.

Three other 'vehicles' creaked at times, but had been adroitly designed to exploit the rather limited talents and to exhibit the lively personalities of their respective stars. Katharine Hepburn, whose previous stage appearances had been negatively received, found in Philip Barry's The Philadelphia Story a background of well-bred if somewhat neurotic high-jinks appropriate to her fragile speech, her wayward comedy, her wiry and nervous style of comedy acting. The Theatre Guild produced The Philadelphia Story in exquisite settings by Robert Edmond Jones. Gertrude Lawrence gamboled through Samson Raphaelson's Skylark, just another drawing room comedy concerning a businessman, a discontented wife, and a cynical bachelor; this one had gowns by Hattie Carnegie, eye-filling sets by Donald Oenslager, and the energetic Miss Lawrence who enlivened what might otherwise have been a dull evening by employing all the charming tricks of an experienced farceur. Farm of Three Echoes was perhaps more obviously tailored to fit the chief player than its two predecessors; certainly the Barrymore theatricality fairly crackled in the scenes which Noel Langley built around a ninety-seven-year-old vixen who slept in her coffin.

A personality of sharp outlines and vigorous self-assertion is made the pivot around whom The Man Who Came to Dinner spins its hilarious course — none other than the almost legendary Alexander Woollcott, whose mordant humor is proverbial, and whose brilliant rudeness to his fellows is here caricatured by Messrs. Hart and Kauffman. The authors who originally intended that Woollcott should himself play in this production, are exceedingly fortunate in having Monty Woolley as substitute. A noted lecturer breaks his hip and is stranded in a small Ohio town, where he attempts, with hilarious consequences, to carry on his accustomed metropolitan life with all its lurid vituperation, its frantic cables and telegrams and telephonings, its fabulous artificiality and its ruthless wit. Two devilishly resourceful playwrights have written the apotheosis of Woollcott.

Revivals.

Few revivals of masterpieces tempted actors or producers. Maurice Evans, whose uncut version of Hamlet had received high praise, buried himself in the false cheeks and stuffing of Falstaff in Henry IV, Part I, a performance which realized all of the external values of the fat Knight, but which had more material than psychological substance. Margaret Webster's direction gave continuous movement to its many scenes. Chekhov re-appeared in a revival of Three Sisters by an amateur group, The Surrey Players, who proved too inexperienced and too young to cope with its intricacies. Out of several novels by Dostoyevsky, Michael Chekhov's troupe had composed The Possessed, which they played in a 'fiercely stylized' manner, an excess of distortion which defeated its own ends.

Not so much classics revived as plays of a short period ago whose value was to be tested in terms of 1939, Sidney Howard's They Knew What They Wanted and Robert Sheriff's Journey's End were found to have lost a good share of their original strength in a decade. Howard's tragic death in September was the occasion of much regret in a theater he had done so much to enrich through the keen, fresh observation of character in Lucky Sam McCarver, his excellent dramatization of Dodsworth, his original use of science in Yellow Jack. Fifteen years after its first performances, in which Pauline Lord and Richard Bennett had made Howard's people seem more robust and more complex than they really were, They Knew What They Wanted seemed the work of a young man of promise, whose talents ripened gradually in subsequent plays, and who would doubtless have surpassed himself had he lived. In the new cast for Journey's End, only Colin Keith-Johnston played his original role as Captain Stanhope. In 1929, it was heart-warming to look back on the Great War and the courage it demanded of men. In 1939, a public whose mind is occupied with current war-making finds a degree of unreality in the public-school Britisher going to his death with 'Alice in Wonderland' on his lips.

Federal Theater.

Those who understood how much vitality the American theater owed to the Federal Projects, and had seen those Projects, in the competent hands of Mrs. Hallic Flanagan and her associates, discover new and exciting techniques for the presentation of dramatic material, reclaim thousands of theater workers from discouragement and artistic dry-rot, open up the neglected 'road' and create a new popular audience for plays of all kinds, feared lest the proponents of governmental economy would destroy the accomplishments of this first experiment in a National Theater, and do so in the so-called 'interests of the taxpayer.' This was in fact what happened in June 1939, at a time when many Federal Theater productions had begun to pay a share of their own cost, and some to make money. During the season which was ending in June, the Projects had proven again their extraordinary virtuosity, their ability to make exciting theater out of anything from a Nebraska hurricane to a long-nosed puppet. From the grim realities of the housing problem (One Third of a Nation) they had turned to jazzing The Mikado. The FTP was first attacked as 'communistic,' and then as needless extravagance. At the last moment, when the Congressional axe was about to fall, telegrams were received in Washington from a large group of actors, producers and critics refuting Representative Woodrum's assertion that 'every theatrical critic of note' had disapproved of the Projects' productions. Eddie Cantor wired his protest to 'those in Congress who can't see beyond the budget.' And the New York Times of June 20 carried an appeal to the theater going public not to allow the Projects to be destroyed, pointing out that 'the productions have given entertainment and education to millions of Americans throughout the country' and 'brought economic relief and moral regeneration to thousands of theater workers who, after a lifetime devoted to their art, found themselves facing destitution'; this statement was signed by thirty-two prominent figures in the theater, including Katharine Cornell, Helen Hayes, Burgess Meredith, Victor Moore, Lee Shubert, Laurette Taylor, Blanche Yurka and Sam Harris. All appeals failed, however, and with the enactment on June 30 of the Emergency Relief Appropriation Act, funds were withdrawn from the Theater Project, and what had been, since 1934, the most significant development in the history of the stage in America, at once both an economic measure and a means for exploring the cultural implications of democracy, came to an end.

Outstanding Productions.

One of these was Mamba's Daughters, which Guthrie McClintic produced. The authors of Porgy, Du Bose and Dorothy Heyward, provided a plot, in a Charleston setting, the bare outlines of which suggest pure melodrama. A Negress, Hagar, is working out a suspended court sentence by hard labor on a plantation in order that her illegitimate daughter may have clothes and a more respectable existence. The daughter is seduced by a ne'er-do-well whom Hagar has befriended, and Hagar murders him, then kills herself. By sheer force of her own quiet intensity, her direct and simple identification of herself with the sordid heroism of Hagar, Ethel Waters made the plot believable, and herself an actress of authority.

Shadow and Substance was a thoughtful play, and its author followed that deserved success with another. Paul Vincent Carroll's The White Steed is an Irish play in which the spirit and the letter once again come into conflict, and Father Shaughnessy, stiff-necked upholder of the faith against moral laxity and spiritual carelessness, who would burn the books of Shaw and Swift and would send bands of Vigilantes to track down dissenters, is faced with mild, quizzical Canon Matt Lavelle, who mutters that 'there's always been a percentage of human weakness in every community since David dragged Bethsabee out of her bath,' and who describes himself as 'an oul' Irish sheepdog . . . I may be blind in one eye and my fur is a bit tore with the furze and the whins, but I know the dark well enough to round up me sheep and take them home.' The Abbey veteran, Barry Fitzgerald, was superb as the Canon.

Lenore and William Cowan, the authors of Family Portrait, had the novel idea of presenting Mary, mother of Jesus, and Joseph, Mary Cleophas and the rest as the simple peasant family they undoubtedly were, an earthy and industrious clan of whom Christ said that a prophet was honorless 'in his own country, and among his own kin, and in his own house.' Judith Anderson's Mary was a rich and moving characterization from the opening scene in which she set the table for her family to the closing words explaining how simple, after all, was the substance of what her son tried to teach men. Conflicts of opinion concerning the merits and even the propriety of the play could not obscure Miss Anderson's achievement.

Arnold Sundgaard wrote Everywhere I Roam, a rather abstract and highly imaginative idyll of pioneer life produced by Marc Connelly with settings by Robert Edmond Jones, music by Lehman Engel, and choreography by Felicia Sorel. American audiences do not take kindly to plays in which the chief characters are known as The Man and The Wife, yet this dramatic poem deserved a more cordial welcome than it received.

In Lillian Hellman's The Little Foxes, a morally down-at-heel Southern family support the old adage, homo homini lupus. The Hubbard brothers and sisters behave like ruthless birds of prey, and Miss Hellman is ruthless in the record she has made of their intrigues, their cowardly weaknesses and their remorseless strength. It is a magnificent character study whose sinister overtones are sounded by Tallulah Bankhead and a remarkable cast, against a setting by Howard Bay which is far more than inert background. The Little Foxes was skillfully directed by the producer, Herman Shumlin.

Jeremiah missed being impressive. Adapted by Eden and Cedar Paul from Stefan Zweig's play of two decades ago, and played by such veterans as Effie Shannon and Arthur Byron, it was costume drama of the most rhetorical sort, and one more disappointment to its producers, the Theatre Guild.

Another veteran, Nazimova, found herself playing what amounted to an evening's monologue in the late Karel Capek's The Mother — a monologue whose theme was the protest of womankind against those conceptions of patriotism and national honor for which husbands and sons give up their lives. The theme was timely, but the play was not; a gifted actress struggled in vain to impose it upon audiences.

Among the year's failures must also be included Victor Wolfson's Pastoral, in which originality seemed incongruity, and in reviewing which those critics who had been less than indulgent toward Mr. Wolfson's previous Excursion now referred to that piece as comparatively a masterpiece. Pastoral, taken over by the amateur theater, may yet reveal qualities unsuspected by those who saw its few performances on Broadway.

With a few exceptions, whole-hearted acclaim was given to The World We Make, the play which Sidney Kingsley, author of Dead End and Men in White, drew from Millen Brand's The Outward Room. Escaping from a sanitarium, a wretched young girl falls in love with the foreman of a laundry, and in the dense, kindly, honest and noisy life that is lived in tenements finds the cure of her mind's illness. The meanings, both individual and social, of Mr. Kingsley's masterly picture of ordinary people, were understood and vividly expressed by a first-rate cast headed by Margo.

Key Largo, the first fall production of the Playwrights Company, was written by Maxwell Anderson, and dealt with a man's struggle to absolve his conscience. Returning from the Spanish civil war a deserter, he finds himself embroiled with gangsters in Key Largo, Florida, in the course of which this unhappy coward makes a last stand. Guthrie McClintic produced the play, and Paul Muni gave the weight of his considerable talent to lines which, as in previous works by this author, often sounded pretentious and pseudo-poetic.

This was a Saroyan year. His first play, My Heart's in the Highlands, was jointly sponsored in April by the Theatre Guild and The Group Theatre, with such actors from the latter organization as Philip Loeb and Art Smith. It was a romantic, breezy and somewhat surrealist charade rather than a play coherently articulated or climactically constructed. A wandering poet, an ancient bugler, a nimble grandmother, and the rest of an odd assortment of characters were but fragments of 'man,' and the playwright seemed to be singing an incoherent hymn to life with a capital L. even though, as one character remarked, 'there must be something wrong somewhere.' This undisciplined extravaganza was played in the spirit of Saroyan, no mean problem even for the amazing Group Theatre ensemble. The second assault on the unities was Saroyan's The Time of Your Life, which Eddie Dowling produced in association with the Guild. A jumbled assortment of human odds-and-ends wandered in and out of a saloon on the San Francisco waterfront, among them a drunkard and a prostitute played respectively by Mr. Dowling and Julie Haydon. Again William Saroyan proclaimed, How I Love People, again some playgoers saluted a gifted dramatic poet, others a conceited and infantile exhibitionist.

Group Theatre Offerings.

Two new plays, and one welcome revival proved the Group Theatre's superior intelligence and capacity as a producing unit. After staging Irwin Shaw's The Gentle People, the Group alternated it in repertory fashion with one of its earlier successes, Odets' Awake and Sing. Two engaging old men, acted by Roman Bohnen and Sam Jaffe, in a boat which they moor off Coney Island, are shown adrift in a world of evil and heartless men. Just as Hagar in another play quietly murdered her daughter's seducer, so these gentle people plan and carry out the death of a gangster whose offense is of the same sort, then resume their leisurely fishing beside the Steeplechase Pier — the meek inheriting the earth. This 'Brooklyn fable' was told against Boris Aronson's freshly conceived settings. Franchot Tone and Sylvia Sidney played the racketeer and the fisherman's daughter.

Awake and Sing, on its way to becoming an American classic, was worth seeing again. Its performance, by almost the original cast, proved how few playwrights can create living, colloquial dialogue and characters moulded by their environment, in this case the drab apartment life of the Bronx. Mr. Odets' Uncle Morty, Moe Axelrod and old Jacob have a three-dimensional solidity rare in a theater satisfied with stereotypes. Morris Carnovsky's Jacob has not been surpassed in recent American acting.

Robert Ardrey's Thunder Rock opened the Group's fall season. In a lighthouse on Lake Michigan, a discouraged idealist who despairs of human progress and the solution of problems which beset man in the present time, talks with the ghosts of a band of immigrants who, in 1849, had been shipwrecked on their way to a new life in America. They learn from the keeper of the lighthouse that the wrongs which had seemed unconquerable to them have long since been righted; he learns in turn to be more far-sighted and less easily discouraged. For this fantasy Mordecai Gorelik designed an appropriately haunted lighthouse; Luther Adler, Frances Farmer and Morris Carnovsky feelingly played Mr. Ardrey's difficult characters.

Summary.

Seen in its ensemble, the theatrical year had more talent than opportunity for talent. Except for Gorelik and Howard Bay, stage designers (Oenslager, Jones, Mielziner) found no challenge in their scenic commissions. First-rate actors like Judith Anderson, Paul Muni, Ethel Waters, Helen Hayes and Katharine Cornell showed up the flimsy character of most 'vehicles.' Casualties were financially disastrous and all too frequent: in the first half of the year eleven plays could be counted whose average number of performances was eight. While Saroyan, Irwin Shaw, Kingsley and Hellman found something to say that was either bracing or socially penetrating, most other playwrights were content, like Dodie Smith and S. N. Behrman, to repeat themselves. And in a year of confusion and catastrophe, one looked in vain for plays of industrial strife, of democracy in its crisis, of Peace and War. Most of the drama was enacted outside the theaters, and men fled from it to seek temporary relief in various forms of enjoyment. In place of penetrating studies of American life, one had the mild Americana of Life With Father and Morning's At Seven. Our theater was marking time.