1942: Drama

Short Run Plays.

A year in which war-minded Americans tried not to waste money on non-essentials, saw the usual number of gamblers risking thousands of dollars on dramatic productions which collapsed almost before playgoers had become aware of their existence. There were nearly fifty such failures in 1942. Comes the Revelation opened on May 26 and closed on May 27. An ill-starred revival of The Time, The Place, and The Girl, failed to bridge the gap in taste between 1907 and 1942, and gave up after a ten-day struggle. A memorable success of former seasons, Capek's R.U.R. was given two days' grace. The lovely Mexican patio which Donald Oenslager designed for Marc Connelly's The Flowers of Virtue went into storage after two or three performances, and Stuart Erwin's delightful playing of the postman who turns into a tree kept the Theater Guild's Mr. Sycamore alive for a fortnight. Of the rest, it need only be said that with few exceptions oblivion was deserved.

Popular Successes.

At the opposite pole of popularity were the customary few productions which, by some happy combination of writing, acting and producing talents, drew audiences month after month. Chronologically, the list begins with plays held over from earlier seasons: Life with Father, going into its fourth year; My Sister Eileen; Arsenic and Old Lace; Lady in the Dark; the perennial show-on-skates, currently entitled Stars on Ice; Noel Coward's light-fingered Blithe Spirit; Junior Miss; Sons o' Fun; Angel Street; and Danny Kaye's sprightly vehicle, Let's Face It! The Spring of 1942 saw Watch on the Rhine close after nearly a year's run, and Claudia after thirteen months. Not quite so sturdy were Best Foot Forward (nine months), Spring Again (seven months), Eddie Cantor's Banjo Eyes (six months), and Sophie Tucker's raucous High Kickers (five months). From eight to twelve weeks were all that Broadway allowed to three comparatively distinguished plays: Candle In the Wind, Brooklyn, U. S. A., and Clash By Night. The stirring Macbeth of Maurice Evans and Judith Anderson played from November 1941, to the end of February 1942.

Effect of War on the Theater.

Whoever chronicles the year 1942 in our theater must answer these questions: did the twelvemonth when Americans' first thought was to defeat Fascism profoundly change the tone of Broadway? Did peace-time reluctance to mingle 'propaganda' with 'art' give way in order that great issues and heroic achievements be dramatized? Did the deeply moving cinema re-enactment of Wake Island find its counterpart on our stages? Did a People's War produce a People's Dramatist?

An art regarded by its practitioners and its public in peacetime as a means of recreation, and only rarely as a medium for treating serious things seriously, could scarcely be expected to revolutionize itself the morning after Pearl Harbor. The play or show that 'makes one forget one's troubles' continued through this first war year to be the most favored type of drama. Continued also was the habit of reviving old successes in the hope of recapturing success; continued was the vogue of the lush musical upon which, in America, converge so many and so fresh musical, designing and acting talents. Continuous was the making of unpretentious, semi-serious pieces of ingenious plot or flavorsome characters. The war served as background in some instances for actions built on conventional patterns; in other cases it provided topical humor for vaudevillesque productions; in a few plays, heroism of the stay-at-home type gave what backbone they possessed. There was one full-fledged Army show. There were a few authors like John Steinbeck and Maxwell Anderson who genuinely rose to the occasion. And it is to be gratefully recorded that the mawkishness of patriotic theatre, during the last war has not re-appeared in the present one.

Original humor and the high spirits of young performers marked Of V We Sing, produced by the American Youth Theater, in which Phil Leeds revealed himself a promising comedian. This Is the Army relied on the more mature skill of Irving Berlin, its only civilian performer, and a group of former professional theatre talents now in khaki, to build a rousing show whose most popular hit was a throwback, — Oh How I Hate to Get Up in the Morning. It was produced under the auspices of the U. S. Army, for the benefit of the Army Relief Fund.

Josephine Bentham and Herschel Williams wrote Janie around the farce situation of a young miss who organizes a party for soldiers, and becomes hostess to sixty of them at once. The war was even more incidental to Strip for Action, in which a broken-down burlesque troupe tries to entertain the boys in an army camp. Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse, co-authors of Life with Father, managed to satirize burlesque while treating their audience to all the lusty pleasures of burlesque itself. Raymond Sovey designed the scenery, and two old-timers of the strip-tease circuit gave it authentic and robustly comic flavor: Billy Koud, a veteran dance director, who played himself, and Joey Faye, the burlesque clown incarnate. Let Freedom Sing, a second venture by the American Youth Theater, with Mitzi Green as guest star, had as its chief asset the witty songs of Harold Rome.

George S. Kauffman staged another fast-and-furious knockabout farce by the author of My Sister Eileen and Junior Miss, Joseph Fields. A mad assortment of Washington hotel-dwellers, including a Russian girl sniper, fire-cracker dialogue and uproarious situations guaranteed a third 'smash' success for Mr. Fields in The Doughgirls.

Doodle Dandy of the U.S.A. was a harlequinade for children; its title character foiled Humphey Dumphrey the dictator in scenes whose imagination and light humor had current meaning; the piece was written by Saul Lancourt, with music by Elsie Siegmeister and dances by Ted Shawn.

The grimmer aspects of warfare appeared in a group of plays, of which three Gilbert Miller productions may be considered typical. The first was Heart of a City, in which Lesley Storm dramatized the play-must-go-on attitude of a theatrical troupe in blitzed London. Its run was short, as was the engagement of Miller's second effort, Lifeline, by Norman Armstrong. This time the heroism was that of the British Merchant Marine, and Dudley Digges headed a competent cast. In December, Miller tried once more with Terence Rattigan's Flare Path, and once more failed. Gladys Hurlbut, who wrote Yankee Point, presented a New England family facing an enemy invasion, but did so rather lifelessly, as audiences soon discovered. Received with like indifference, despite expert direction by Guthrie McClintic and scenery by Stewart Chaney, was The Morning Star, Emlyn Williams' play about Londoners under bombardment, a synthetic and shallow piece.

Only four American playwrights in 1942 approached the war with a sense of its urgency, its human complexity, its challenge to the wisdom and creative powers of the artist. Two were established writers, Steinbeck and Maxwell Anderson; two were young men, Dan James and Allan Kenward. Steinbeck's The Moon Is Down met critical antagonism because its Nazi soldiers were not in all respects the antithesis of their victims in a nameless small town in the north of Europe; the German Colonel, played by Otto Kruger, knew his Greek philosophers, performed his brutal task with distaste, and so shared the audience's sympathy with the quietly heroic Mayor, acted with great skill by Ralph Morgan. Howard Bay designed one of his extraordinarily apt settings for a play which, all reservations made, was still a splendid tribute to the power and dignity with which the meek conquer their conquerors. Winter Soldiers dealt with the same theme, but Dan James's play was sharper in outline, more concisely dramatic; in theatre terms, it lacked the richness of character that Steinbeck achieved, but had more sweep and more urgency. Directed by Lem Ward, it was produced by the Studio Theatre of the New School, and closed before it had been given a fair chance to compete with more meretricious offerings. First produced on the West Coast as Cry Havoc! Allan Kenward's melodramatic piece about nurses on Bataan came to Broadway in December as Proof Thru the Night. Beneath exterior sensationalism, it was the old formula of inferior human types reformed by a crisis, and the brittleness of these types, and the somewhat contrived effect of the critical events, robbed the play of any substantial meanings. Through its first half, Maxwell Anderson's The Eve of St. Mark had the warm sense of characterization which is one of Mr. Anderson's gifts; but again, as in previous plays, he succumbed to the temptation, at the moment of greatest tension, to transfer his people's conflicts to a more literary plane. This indecision between prose and poetry marred the work. What one remembered with gratitude was the simple and searching family portrait of the opening scenes, the fine playing of William Prince as Quizz and of Aline MacMahon as his mother, the superb settings by Howard Bay and the masterly direction of Lem War.

Clifford Odets made the English version of Konstantin Simonov's The Russian People, for which Boris Aronson designed the settings, and which the Theatre Guild presented under the direction of Harold Clurman. Although it could not reach the heights of its own theme, and this in part through inadequate stage production, its vitality and realism at least reminded native playmakers that the occasion calls for something beyond the use of the war as background for conventional plots and stock characters, beyond pseudo-mysticism or melodrama.

Theater workers have contributed more directly to war morale outside than inside the playhouse, through the American Theater Wing War Service, which has founded half a dozen Stage Door Canteens, organized a speaker's bureau, set up a personnel division for guiding theatre people into war work, and is in process of creating brief topical shows for factory workers, called Lunchtime Follies. Many an actor has found a new eloquence with which to sell war bonds.

The bulk of theater fare in 1942 was seasoned to pre-war taste, with an occasionally sharper spicing in response to the stepped-up emotions of today. Clever stage design was in evidence, resourceful directing, shrewd observation, musical and dancing talent of real originality, and acting which ranged from the competent to the brilliant.

Revues and Vaudeville.

Leonard Sillman essayed that difficult genre, the 'intimate revue,' with New Faces of 1943 — and failed. Catherine Littlefield gave her choreographic talents to Stars on Ice. Vaudeville, disguised or plain, was a staple of the season: built around Ed Wynn's clowning, it was called Laugh, Town, Laugh. As Show Time, it displayed the familiar antics of Jack Haley and George Jessel: as Priorities of 1942 and New Priorities of 1943, it assembled Bert Wheeler, Willie Howard, Lou Holtz. Phil Baker, Paul Draper and others in programs which seemed more like televised radio shows than vaudeville as we remember it. Count Me In was vaudeville in essence, a Catholic University entertainment taken over by such professionals as Luella Gear and Charles Butterworth, and delightfully set by Howard Bay. Richly produced as to settings, music, lighting and costumes, Michael Todd's Star and Garter was a burlesque show on a sophisticated plane, and was played for burlesque values by Bobby Clark and by the queen of strip-tease, Gypsy Rose Lee. Wine, Women and Song belonged to the same species; it employed the inimitable Jimmy Savo, and was billed as a 'revue-vaudeville-burlesque.' Johnny Green composed the music for Beat the Band, a George Abbott show.

Rodgers and Hart proved once more their supremacy in the field with By Jupiter. Its plot-outline was borrowed from The Warrior's Husband, and the beauty and good taste of its scenes and costumes are to be credited to Jo Mielziner and Irene Sharaff. Its leading player was Ray Bolger, who long since became the peer of all tap-dancers, and who now adds superb pantomimic and verbal clowning to his achievements. His performance as Sapiens was an education in comic resourcefulness, in the perfectly timed gesture, the exquisite mobility of face and figure. By Jupiter is the American show at its best.

Revivals.

The past year proved that reviving old plays has risks as great as producing new ones. The casualty list includes Hedda Gabler, in which the First Lady of the Greek Theatre, Madame Katina Paxinou, acted with a somewhat dated virtuosity; Cheryl Crawford's revival of Barrie's A Kiss for Cinderella, with Luise Rainer miscast in the Maude Adams role; an Erwin Piscator production of Lessing's Nathan the Wise which stressed its championship of racial and religious tolerance; and a double bill combining Saroyan's Hello Out There and Chesterton's Magic, with Eddie Dowling as producer and actor.

Operetta found comparative favor. For two months, the Boston Comic Opera Company played Gilbert and Sullivan. The Chocolate Soldier in June and July was succeeded by The Merry Widow, The New Moon, and Rosalinda (an English version by George Marion, Jr., of Strauss' Die Fledermaus.) Bobby Clark and Mary Boland as Bob Acres and Mrs. Malaprop played The Rivals for obviously comic effects. The musical version of Porgy and Bess, revived by Cheryl Crawford, equalled its original success in 1935, with Todd Duncan again as Porgy, and Sportin' Life in the more than capable hands of Avon Long. Elmer Rice's Councellor-at-Law seemed destined for a second long run, by virtue of its engrossing good craftsmanship and the mellowed skill of Paul Muni as George Simon. Katharine Cornell was responsible for two star-studded revivals. Both individual brilliance and perfection of ensemble caused Candida, produced for Army and Navy relief, to extend its engagement; its case included Miss Cornell, Dudley Digges, Burgess Meredith, Raymond Massey and Mildred Natwick. Later in the year, a group of equal eminence was directed by Guthrie McClintic in Chekhov's The Three Sisters, — Judith Anderson, Ruth Gordon, Gertrude Musgrove, Tom Powers, Edmund Gwenn, — no mere background for Miss Cornell, but a superb instrument responding to every nuance and overtone of a play which challenges the actor's best.

Briefer Mention.

Run-of-the-mill entertainment was the goal of George Abbott's Jason, by Samson Raphaelson, in which a playwright teaches a dramatic critic about Life; Patterson Greene's thin comedy about the Pennsylvania Dutch, Papa Is All; and John Van Druten's Solitaire. Blood-curdlers were Uncle Harry, with Eva La Gallienne and Joseph Schildkraut; Guest in the House by Hagar Wilde and Dale Eunson, in which a neurotic home-destroyer is horribly destroyed; The Willow and I, John Patrick's study of a conflict between two sisters which brings madness to one of them. What is known as 'feminine psychology' was displayed by John Van Druten and Lloyd Morris in The Damask Cheek, its chief character resourcefully created by Flora Robson. A well-known restaurant frequented by Yiddish theatre folk was the setting of H. S. Kraft's Café Crown, in which Morris Carnovsky and Sam Jaffe richly impersonated two of the Royal's most flavorsome figures. Philip Barry's semi-allegorical Without Love was no more than an occasion for Katharine Hepburn's mannerisms. The Great Big Doorstep, by Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett, could have been an engrossing folk play about shiftless Louisiana Cajuns, had the characters acted by Louis Calhern and Dorothy Gish been more substantially written. S. N. Behrman's version of an old play by Ludwig Fulda, The Pirate, was a scene-designer's and costumer's holiday for Lemuel Ayers and Miles White; for Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne, an exercise in crisp commedia dell'arte far within the limits of their talents. Sweet Charity made merry with the Woman's Friendly Hand Club; it was contrived by Irving Brecker and Manuel Seff, and produced by George Abbott.

Two plays deserve better than merely to be placed on the record, Native Son and The Skin of Our Teeth. The former was first produced in 1941, and played a return engagement in the fall of 1942. Canada Lee, who created Bigger Thomas in Orson Welles' original production, seemed more magnificent than ever in his portrayal of the tortured, frustrated Negro whom Paul Green and Richard Wright have so deeply understood and so richly brought to life. The Skin of Our Teeth was a whimsical and occasionally moving fantasy on mankind's capacity for muddling through disaster. Elia Kazan shrewdly directed it, and Albert Johnson matched its non-sequiturs in his settings, while Fredric March, Florence Eldridge and Tallulah Bankhead provided the surrealist acting which the piece required. The Skin of Our Teeth celebrates with tonic effect those qualities in man which invite catastrophes and by good luck and good heart surmount them. Those more concerned with the here and now, and less with the cosmic, have been more inspired by Native Son, where man struggles against man in scenes sharply focussed on present-day realities. Both plays demand far more than Broadway's average skill in authorship, more perception and technique in production and acting, and more alert intelligence in audiences. Between the two extremes lies the whole present range of our theatre.

1941: Drama

Résumé of the Year.

That Broadway tenure is no measure of a play's intrinsic merit becomes obvious when one considers the productions that bridged 1940 and 1941, having raised their first curtains in the fall of the former year. Four months was all that audience-interest allowed to Elmer Rice's anti-fascist Flight To The West, to Helen Hayes' and Maurice Evans' frolicsome Twelfth Night revival, to the fresh fantasy of Cabin In The Sky, and to Elmer Harris' Johnny Belinda, in which Helen Craig so appealingly acted a deaf mute. Of five months' duration were several pieces less deserving than the foregoing: Ed Wynn's vaudeville, Boys and Girls Together; George Washington Slept Here, its sure-fire dialogue and actability guaranteeing it a second career among the amateur theatres; Old Acquaintance, to which Peggy Wood and Jane Cowl gave their ripe talents as comédiennes; Hold on to Your Hats, kept alive by the raucous humors of Martha Raye and Al Jolson. The fresh satirical revue from Hollywood, Meet the People, closed long before its shallower competitors. A revived Charley's Aunt chalked up six months of hilarious business, and The Man Who Came To Dinner played for eight. Three musicals gained year-long success: Louisiana Purchase, which had moderately good tunes and book, and the irresistible Victor Moore; Pal Joey, a George Abbott show based on the escapades of a hoofer taken from John O'Hara's satiric pieces in the New Yorker; and Panama Hattie, whose chief boast was the ever-delightful, irrepressible Ethel Merman.

Even more inexhaustible attractions were found by audiences in a few shows. By the time Separate Rooms came to an end in the fall of 1941, this machine-made farce had played a year and a half. A New Hellzapoppin continued throughout the year the feverish slapstick of the older version; and 1941 will at least be famous as the year in which Tobacco Road closed a Broadway run which began back in December 1933.

Already more than a year old are four productions which seem on their way to making records for endurance. It Happens On Ice has gone into a second edition. Life with Father can be seen in three cities: Dorothy Stickney and Howard Lindsay reincarnate every middle-aged American's mother and father on Broadway, Lillian Gish and Percy Waram in Chicago, Dorothy Gish and Louis Calhern in Boston. Ruth McKenney's My Sister Eileen, in its dramatization by Chodorov and Fields, still delights audiences, and Ethel Barrymore continues with dignity and eloquence to grace the part of the schoolmistress of Emlyn Williams' The Corn Is Green.

It would be gratifying to report that the offerings of 1941, assayed as a whole, were found to contain finer qualities than those of the previous year, to reveal new writing, acting and staging talents, to set higher imaginative standards. The record would not support such claims. The familiar pattern is repeated, and of the thirty-odd productions to be seen in the closing days of 1941, one-third were musical shows, one-third light comedies; of the remaining third, three or four might be said to have more than seasonal interest. And the year's crop of outright, flop-by-night failures seemed bigger than ever — well over forty of them with an average life of twelve days. The strongest among them, S. N. Behrman's The Talley Method, played four weeks; the best of them had in their casts actors like Pauline Lord, Barry Fitzgerald, Elia Kazan, Margo, and Elsa Lanchester; the frailest was titled The Lady Who Came to Stay, who belied her title and remained on the boards for two days. They were, in most cases, ramshackle affairs, whose producers gambled and lost.

Musicals.

The diligent producers of musical shows were as active as ever in 1941, and a few of them struck gold. First of all, there was Moss Hart's Lady in the Dark, produced by Sam Harris. A ladies' magazine editor, through psychoanalysis, re-lives her conscious and sub-conscious past; fact and dream, normal and fantastic are blended in a thoroughly original and exquisitely produced piece deriving its many perfections from the varied talents of its collaborators: Kurt Weill for haunting music, Ira Gershwin for deft lyrics, Albertina Rasch for choreography, Harry Horner for entrancing and witty décor, Irene Sharaff and Hattie Carnegie for costumes; and above all, Gertrude Lawrence bringing superb talents as actress, singer and dancer to the part of the distraught lady in the dark. Crude by comparison, Crazy with the Heat had at least the familiar comic gifts of Willie Howard, whose impersonation of a broken-down Russian ballet-master stopped the show; Albert Johnson designed the settings, and Catherine Littlefield the dances. George Abbott, mindful of previous success with a musical built on the college theme and peopled with youngsters, chose a Winsocki prep school for the locale of Best Foot Forward. With the exception of Rosemary Lane, who played the disruptive movie star, the cast of this musical was a roster of newly discovered talent — Nancy Walker, Victoria Schools, June Allyson, Maureen Cannon. John Cecil Holm wrote the book, Hugh Martin and Ralph Blane the tunes and lyrics.

Danny Kaye, in Herbert and Dorothy Fields' Let's Face It! became one of our most resourceful comics in numbers especially contrived for him by Sylvia Fine and Max Liebman within the framework of a Cole Porter show which had, besides, three ludicrous females in search of adventure in an army camp, played by Eve Arden, Mary Jane Walsh and Edith Meiser. In High Kickers, which sentimentalizes the old-fashioned leg-show, George Jessel and Sophie Tucker embodied the lusty and not-too-finical humors of an out-moded genre, in settings by Nat Karson, with a script by Jessel himself aided by such old hands as Bert Kalmar and Harry Ruby.

Sons o' Fun was really a third edition of Hellzapoppin, depending for its hilarity on the vaudevillians Olsen and Johnson, abetted by Ella Logan and the torrid Carmen Miranda; its dance routines were by Robert Alton, and its settings by Raoul Pène DuBois. In the conventional mode of operetta, Oscar Hammerstein 2nd wrote the book and lyrics and assumed the direction of Sunny River, in charming sets by Stewart Chaney, and with smart costumes and dances by Irene Sharaff and Carl Randall. Eddie Cantor chose Christmas Night for the première of his Banjo Eyes, the plot of which had been drawn by Joe Quillan and Izzy Ellinson from that old favorite. Three Men On a Horse. The horse in this extravaganza is named 'Banjo Eyes,' and is played by Mayo and Morton in scarcely less frisky style than that of the ebullient Eddie, who gambols, chatters and prances quite as though he had not been absent from Broadway upwards of ten years. Vernon Duke composed the tunes to words by John Latouche and Harold Adamson, and a bevy of designers have given opulence and sparkle to a show which has a Belmont Park finale.

Comedies.

That one-third of the year's product which ranged from the frankly farcical to the intelligently comic, employed as varied talents as those of Noel Coward and Owen Davis. At one extreme was Pie in the Sky, which the critics considered a regrettable indiscretion; at the other, William Saroyan's fascinating and wayward The Beautiful People. Gay on the whole, with a special appeal to theatre people, were the antics of six stage-thirsty juveniles in search of a producer, in Francis Swann's Out of the Frying Pan, which William Deering produced, and which Alexander Kirkland directed with an eye for laugh-getting. A similar goal was set, and at moments reached, by Theatre, another portrait of the famous actress on the stage and in private life originally from the pen of Somerset Maugham, and dramatized by Guy Bolton. In Theatre, Cornelia Otis Skinner displayed her technical brilliance in a role for which the rest of the piece was mere background.

Similarly a vehicle for stardom was Spring Again, by Bertram Bloch and Isabel Leighton, whose crusty ancestor-worshipper could have been played by no other than C. Aubrey Smith, and whose fragile elderly lead fitted Grace George to perfection. It was Joseph Buloff as a Hollywood producer who brought this play to life and challenged the laurels of his mellow co-stars. In Blithe Spirit, Noel Coward sought to give the old triangle a new angle by putting one of its three chief characters into the spirit world. A broadly-caricatured medium, played by Mildred Natwick, materializes the first wife of a novelist (Clifton Webb) Leonora Corbett plays this inconvenient apparition, and Peggy Wood the more substantial but equally troublesome second wife, in scenes which are Noel Coward at his not-quite-best — inventive, witty and sparkling. No such originality marked Parker Fennelly's Cuckoos on the Hearth, a rather mad pot-pourri of farce situations and characters kidnapped from other entertainments, directed by Antoinette Perry and sponsored by Brock Pemberton.

In Junior Miss, Jerome Chodorov and Joseph Fields have again, as in My Sister Eileen, drawn a play from sketches in the New Yorker, in this case Sally Benson's series about the Graves family trying to cope with its adolescent young. The 'junior miss' of the play's title, is brought to hilarious life by Patricia Peardon. Rose Franken has built around another family problem — this time the three-cornered conflict of husband, wife and wife's mother — a compact, quiet and searching character-study of real distinction, and has been fortunate in the cast of Claudia: Donald Cook expertly plays the husband, Dorothy McGuire the immature and unpredictable young wife, and Frances Starr the mother. Donald Oenslager designed the single setting for one of the year's few substantial dramas.

Another family perches dizzily on a San Francisco hilltop in William Saroyan's The Beautiful People; their home appropriately skeletonized in surrealist style by the designer, Samuel Leve, and their life a typical Saroyanesque mingling of the real and the fanciful, the logical and the irresponsible. These fragments of their author's own permanently adolescent mind play with mice, blow trumpets, live on forged checks, write one-word novels and behave, in short, like delightful and very human and amiable lunatics, not the least reason for their appeal being a combination of absurdity and affection in their attitude toward life and each other.

Murder and Mystery.

Murder and mystery were the theme of both Arsenic and Old Lace and Brooklyn, U.S.A., and both plays gave an original twist to violent death. The former actually made unnatural death a subject for laughter by creating two lovable and kindly old maids who have a weakness for putting visitors quietly out of the way, and who compete with their brother's record for victims. Joseph Kesselring wrote Arsenic and Old Lace; Bretaigne Windust directed it for Lindsay and Crouse. Josephine Hull, Jean Adair and Boris Karloff played the Brewster trio. Audiences quickly responding to something audaciously new in the field of dramatic thrillers, continued after a full year to fill the theatre. It is too soon to predict whether Brooklyn, U.S.A., will match that record. Its two authors, John Bright and Asa Bordages, being newspaper men, are familiar with the details of recent gangster murders in Brooklyn, and have based their thriller on fact. Through authentic detail and an evocation of the grim and sordid atmosphere of racketeering, an atmosphere intensified by Howard Bay's settings, the playwrights have given their piece documentary as well as melodramatic value; and their emphasis on the human consequences of the events recorded lifts Brooklyn, U.S.A., from melodrama at times to tragedy.

Another thriller was the psychological horror drama, Angel Street, by Patrick Hamilton, originally played in London as Gas-Light, and brilliantly acted here by Vincent Price, Leo Carroll and Judith Evelyn. A murder mystery with the light touch was Mr. and Mrs. North, from a book of the same name written by Frances and Richard Lockridge, and dramatized by Owen Davis, with characters provided by a series in the New Yorker. The Norths, in story and in play, were a delightfully erratic pair who found themselves on the trail of a double murder; they were acted by Albert Hackett and Peggy Conklin.

Revivals.

No year fails to bring revivals of time-tested plays, and 1941 saw three outstanding ones: Euripides, Shakespeare and Shaw. Gilbert Murray's version of The Trojan Women, directed by Margaret Webster, appeared briefly under the aegis of the new Experimental Theatre. Miss Webster acted in it, as did Dame May Whitty; the choreography was by Felicia Sorel, and the incidental music by Lehman Engel.

It was again the brilliantly resourceful Margaret Webster who directed Maurice Evans's revival of Macbeth, with musical score by Engel and in settings by Samuel Leve. Thanks to Miss Webster, music, settings, lights and sounds drive rapidly to a crescendo of horror. Mr. Evans, an intelligent and resourceful Macbeth, fails to achieve, as a whole, the heroic dimensions of his part; Judith Anderson creates the most memorable Lady Macbeth in recent memory, and stands at the very top of her profession.

Another first lady of our theatre is Katharine Cornell, and it is a tribute to her respect for the theatre that she played Mrs. Dubedat in The Doctor's Dilemma not as a star role but in proportion to Shaw's play as a whole. The revival was staged by Guthrie McClintic, with settings by Donald Oenslager. Wherever Shaw was diabolically satirical at the expense of medical pretension and bombast, the play was most amusing; the passages where Shaw sentimentalized, as in the famous credo of the dying painter, were harder to vitalize for an audience of today. Fortunately, the piece was directed with an eye for those brittle Shavian qualities which best survive time, and acted by a cast richly capable of projecting them, including Whitford Kane as Sir Patrick Cullen and Raymond Massey as Sir Colenso Ridgeon. Miss Cornell's Jennifer was, of course, a graceful and exquisite performance.

Serious Plays.

A relatively small number of plays in 1941 dealt with the war, or with the issues involved in it. The best of all anti-Nazi plays to date, and probably the finest play of the year, was Lillian Hellman's Watch on the Rhine. Into the secure, comfortable Washington home of an elderly diplomat's widow stalk the passions and ideals for which men are dying throughout the world. Her son-in-law is Kurt Mueller, a secret anti-Nazi agent whose identity becomes known to the blackmailing pro-Fascist Rumanian nobleman who is his fellow houseguest. Kurt has to murder the count and go back to his work in Europe, breaking once and for all with the quiet life his sensitive character needs, for the sake of doing what his conscience believes necessary. It is into this conflict of character in Kurt, nobly resolved, that Miss Hellman has put her most trenchant writing and Paul Lukas his superb acting abilities; the rest of the cast, directed in masterly fashion by Herman Shumlin, creates characters who live long after the final curtain — Lucile Watson the matron, Mady Christians her daughter, George Couloris the Rumanian blackguard.

Frederick Brennan's The Wookey is, by comparison, routine stuff, mingling farce and tragedy, domestic humor and air-raids, in the simple tale of a bargeman in whom British individualism is incarnated, and who battles two enemies at once — the 'government' which is always making mistakes, and the Nazis who are trying to destroy the home which is his castle. The settings are by Jo Mielziner, and Edmund Gwenn's mellow acting makes thin playwriting seem more substantial than it is.

Maxwell Anderson's Candle in the Wind would like to be heroic as Watch on the Rhine is heroic; but the story, this time in prose, of the long efforts of an American actress to free her French lover from a Nazi prison, never achieves compelling emotional force, although Helen Hayes brings charm and defiance to the part of the actress, and the bestiality of Nazi officialdom is exposed with bitter thoroughness. A similar inability to live up to a major theme weakened The Land Is Bright, in which George Kaufman and Edna Ferber traced the history of an American family from the 'nineties to now, its ancient quarrels forgotten in the present crisis. Arnold Moss, Martha Sleeper and Phyllis Povah headed a large cast; the plot was lavish in action, the sets of Jo Mielziner lively, the total effect of the production brittle and unconvincing. The war with its hatreds and suspicions is in the background of a rather tepid piece called Letters to Lucerne, produced by Dwight Deere Wiman with sets by Raymond Sovey, and with a cast of young people who turn out to be the daughters of celebrities — Nancy Wiman, Mary Barthelmess, and Sonya Stokowski among them. The authors, Fritz Rotter and Allen Vincent, depict quietly and at times sentimentally the impact of war on six girls who live in a Swiss boarding-school. Grete Mosheim, as the German child on whose head the miniature tempests converge, plays her part with considerable eloquence. Howard Koch and John Huston wrote In Time to Come, and appropriately opened it on the eighty-fifth anniversary of Woodrow Wilson's birth. It deals with the betrayal of his peace ideas after the First World War, and derives its interest from being a timely warning and reminder of past mistakes, rather than from strong dramatic qualities of its own. Arnold Korff, Russell Collins and others give competent impersonations of historical persons, and Richard Gaines is a convincing Wilson.

It may indicate a 'trend' that so few plays in recent months dealt seriously with American problems. In its quiet way, Sophie Treadwell's Hope for a Harvest did that. What shall the American do, driven by economic forces from the acres his family has always cultivated, and seeking a new usefulness, a new centre of gravity for his character? Frederic March and Florence Eldridge played thoughtfully rounded characters with authority, in this Theatre Guild production. Marc Blitzstein's incisive and challenging opera, No for an Answer, played for three Sunday nights in January, revealing a score of greater maturity and more controlled power than that of The Cradle Will Rock, with all the social sting of the former work. The production of Clifford Odets' Clash by Night had settings of superb quality by Boris Aronson and was directed by a master of the art, Lee Strasberg. Tallulah Bankhead and Joseph Schildkraut, as the Staten Island wife and her lover, did their expert best with scenes which the playwright had somehow bungled, and which even his occasional flashes of insight failed to make into a play. Paul Green and Richard Wright together made a play in ten blistering scenes from the latter's novel, Native Son. Ostensibly a shocker, Native Son is basically a study in those hatreds, fears, and violences engendered by smouldering resentment toward race prejudice; the fast-moving plot, and the emphasis on melodrama in Orson Welles' staging of the murder scenes allowed less insight into the mind of the negro Bigger Thomas than did the novel, but Canada Lee enriched the part by his playing of it, and the audience, directly addressed from the forestage by Thomas' defense attorney, was left in no doubt as to the author's meaning.

Retrospect.

In retrospect, what is the critical measure of a year whose best plays were so few — Claudia, The Beautiful People, Native Son, Watch on the Rhine? The answer is to be found in a survey published on its own twenty-fifth anniversary by Theatre Arts magazine. That survey reminds us that in the dozen years following 1915, Robert Edmond Jones designed The Man Who Married a Dumb Wife and the provocative Macbeth; Arthur Hopkins staged The Jest and John Barrymore's Richard the Third; R.U.R. and The Adding Machine spoke a new language; Paul Green won the Pulitzer Prize for In Abraham's Bosom; O'Neill wrote The Emperor Jones and Odets, Awake and Sing; the Civic Repertory Theatre and the Group Theatre challenged Broadway, and set a new standard for ensemble acting. Those years saw an originality, an artistic integrity, and a technical resourcefulness which the years since cannot match, — with the honorable exception of the Federal Theatre.

Norris Houghton looks elsewhere for signs of promise. In his Advance from Broadway, he sums up 19,000 miles of travel throughout America in search of an American theatre. He found the Summer stock theatres as robust as ever. He found many a trade union producing meaningful plays on its own. He saw plays given to farmers who paid for their admission with the produce of their farms. In widespread community theatres, he found a healthy bond between players and audience. He discovered historical pageants which had grown out of local history, and college theatres striving to develop new playwrights while keeping alive the great classics of the theatre. In Alabama, in Texas, in Vermont, he saw at least the makings of a genuinely national theatre which could become an expression of our life as a democratic people. Here, at least, 'the land is bright.' See also LITERATURE, AMERICAN.

1940: Drama

Long-Run Successes.

In the first week of 1940, Pins and Needles, occasionally freshened with new skits and tunes, seemed good for an indefinite run; and so did Tobacco Road. The Little Foxes and The Philadelphia Story had almost achieved their one year's run, and Saroyan's wayward dialogue was to hold The Time of Your Life on the boards until late Spring, together with Margin for Error. Most of the other entertainments which managed to survive into the new year did so by old and tested means; tunes and lyrics a little smarter than the average, Too Many Girls; bawdy humors expensively dressed, Du Barry Was a Lady; vaudeville antics, Hellzapoppin; farce situations as old as farce itself, See My Lawyer; mockery at the expense of an identifiable celebrity, The Man Who Came to Dinner; nostalgia for the good old days, Life With Father. One and all, these shows outdistanced their competitors by some twist of originality in plot, by fresher-than-average dialogue, or by comedians of superior talent like Bert Lahr, Howard Lindsay and Monty Woolley. Meanwhile, Key Largo died in February, and even before that, Helen Hayes' charm and intelligence failed to compensate for the brittleness of Ladies and Gentlemen. Sidney Kingsley's The World We Make deserved better than eighty performances, and was to reappear between covers when Burns Mantle published, in abbreviated form, the ten best plays of the 1939-40 season.

If any one doubts that the majority of Broadway's offerings are intended to help audiences forget their troubles, let him observe that in January, 1940, one-third of the current productions were 'musicals,' one-third were farces and comedies of light texture, and the remaining third, plays to be described as 'serious'; and let him further note that in December of the same year, the proportions were roughly the same.

Musical Shows.

Even among musical shows, the mortality rate was high during 1940. Earl Carroll closed his Vanities after twenty-five performances, despite 'the most beautiful girls in the world.' Dwight Deere Wiman produced Higher and Higher, with lyrics and tunes by the nearly infallible Rodgers and Hart, and with eye-filling scenery by Jo Mielziner. The comic Jack Haley disported himself in it, as did a trained seal; yet all these talents, human and animal, failed to make the show a success. Lee Shubert's Keep Off the Grass was relatively short-lived. Those who did see it were charmed by the variety of talents its dancers revealed. — Betty Bruce, Jose Limon, and the incredibly agile Ray Bolger. Balanchine devised the dances, Nat Karson the sets and costumes, and Jimmy Durante moved in and out of the scenes with his hoarse, rough-edged humors. For Walk With Music, Anton Dolin directed the dancers; a musical version of Three Blind Mice, it played just long enough to reveal the talents of a new dance team, Alice Dudley and Kenneth Bostock. Nancy Hamilton's Two for the Show repeated the small-scale, charade-like good humor of her One for the Money. Richard Haydn again played Mr. Carp, and John Murray Anderson exquisitely staged the intimate show. Another sequel was Reunion in New York, made tolerably amusing by the combined abilities of the same Austrian refugee group who, the season before, had produced From Vienna.

Only five shows-with-music won real success. The first in point of time was Louisiana Purchase, whose 'book' was written by B. G. de Silva and Morrie Ryskind, and whose songs were written by Irving Berlin. None too respectful of the historical events in New Orleans suggested by its title, the authors gave Victor Moore a part tailored to his inimitable skill — the querulously pathetic Senator Oliver P. Loganberry who successfully resisted the siren wiles of Vera Zorina and Irene Bordoni. The cast also included William Gaxton, and the ballets as conceived by Balanchine were both beautiful and witty. With top-notch talents in so many fields, small wonder that Louisiana Purchase, produced in May, was still turning customers away in December. Hold On to Your Hats brought back to Broadway — always a risky venture — a comedian long since identified with the movies. Employing those hearty, man-to-man exhortations, those unashamed sentimentalisms to which one would have expected to find less response now than in his 'Mammy' days, Al Jolson captivated a new generation. His impersonation of the radio bandit who is, away from the microphone, a shy and timorous creature, was one of the comic triumphs of the year. Bert Gordon and Martha Raye helped him to stop the show with a burlesque broadcast, and Raoul Pene Du Bois maintained his high reputation as designer of scenes and costumes at once opulent and delightful.

In Panama Hattie, another comedian changed the title but not the nature of her vehicle. The same Ethel Merman who was Katy from Haiti in Du Barry Was a Lady, became Panama Hattie to the words of de Silva and Fields, and the music of Cole Porter. The much-demanded Raoul Pene Du Bois created the scenery for this musical.

Departing from formula, Cabin in the Sky is a Negro musical fantasy superior to its white rivals in originality, in beauty and in unity. Brimstone and Paradise wage battle for the immortal soul of Joe Jackson, whose spirit is willing but whose flesh is weak. Something of the folk quality of Green Pastures comes through the acting of Todd Duncan, the glowing voice of Ethel Waters, the Lucifer of Rex Ingram, the exquisite choral singing of J. Rosamond Johnson's choir, Boris Aronson's deeply imaginative settings, and the dances which Balanchine devised, and Katherine Dunham and her group performed, Lynn Root wrote this 'musical,' and Vernon Duke composed its songs. Cabin in the Sky is rare entertainment and something more than entertainment.

Pal Joey revolved about the master of ceremonies in a Chicago night-club, a character too sinister for musical comedy, despite songs by Rodgers and Hart, dances by Robert Alton, and settings by Mielziner. All In Fan, with that supreme tap dancer, Bill Robinson, cost its producers $125,000 and played four Broadway performances. Meet the People, a revue in the manner of Pins and Needles, came East under the auspices of The Hollywood Theatre Alliance, and proved its superiority to more expensive but less intelligent rivals.

Most years provide at least one spectacle for the huge spaces of Center Theater in Rockefeller City. Norman Bel Geddes, brilliant modern designer, produced It Happens on Ice, and evoked original patterns in movement, line, color and light in this ballet-on-ice which also enlisted the choreographic skill of Leon Leonidoff and Catherine Littlefield. Joe Cook, popular clown of past shows, found himself not at home in these spectacular but chilly surroundings.

Comedies.

That one-third of the year's offering which falls within the term 'light entertainment,' can be quickly summarized. Oblivion rather swiftly caught Lee Tracy's crude vehicle, Every Man for Himself, by Milton Lazarus, and the brittle idyll by Robert Keith, entitled Romantic Mr. Dickens. That droll comedienne, Molly Picon, starred briefly in a comedy with incidental music, Morning Star, which was both light and serious in its portrayal of Jewish middle-class life, and for which Howard Bay employed his unusual gifts as scene-designer. A comedy taking place in a Yorkshire village wasted the talents of Tom Powers, Estelle Winwood, Alison Skipworth and J. C. Nugent: it was called When We Are Married, and its author was J. B. Priestley. Horse Fever had Hollywood briskness because it was in part written by the author of innumerable movie skits, Eugene Conrad. The psychoanalyzing of a balky horse was its theme, and Ezra Stone played a leading role. Jimmy Savo, inimitable pantomimist, gathered together an evening of his familiar short turns, in Mum's the Word. That urbane exile from Budapest, Ferenc Molnar, chose a delicatessen in Switzerland as the locale for a slight piece whose underlying theme was triteness itself. Edna Best graced the few performances which Delicate Story was encouraged to give. A George Abbott farce, The White-Haired Boy, with settings by Oenslager and script by Beatrice Kaufman and Charles Martin, appeared and disappeared without critical commotion. Marjery Sharp made farce-comedy of her novel The Nutmeg Tree, and Gladys George played what has become a theatrical stereotype, the aging ex-chorus girl whose daughter lives in the lap of luxury, and who comes nobly to the rescue. Lawrence Langner and Armina Marshall essayed rather bawdy folk-comedy in Susanna and the Elders, and failed. Equally unsuccessful was the attempt of Allan Wood, in The Weak Link, to combine mystery with humor. The authors of Beverly Hills — Lynn Starling and Howard J. Green — tried to recapture the acidulous humors of Claire Booth's The Women, by maliciously gossiping about Hollywood, but this time the formula refused to work. Toward the end of the year, a forty-eight year old laugh-machine proved more sturdy than most modern comic inventions, when José Ferrer played Lord Fancourt Babberly in a revival of Charlie's Aunt produced by Day Tuttle and Richard Skinner. One more dramatization of modern bewilderment was contrived, with some degree of wittiness, by Irwin Shaw, and captioned Retreat From Pleasure.

To review most of the above plays is to write their deserved obituaries. Perhaps Saroyan's irresponsible comedy, Love's Old Sweet Song, deserved more than its month on Broadway. It had the benefit of joint production by Eddie Dowling and the Theatre Guild; it had a stage family, no less than sixteen Yearlings from Oklahoma; it had Walter Huston to play the pitchman. Inferior plays survived it, among them Separate Rooms, in which Alan Dinehart evoked what humor was possible from the theme of Winchellesque blackmail. Falling below their accustomed level of originality and sustained fun, Kaufman and Hart contrived George Washington Slept Here, and cleverly cast Ernest Truex as the city man who acquires an ancient farmhouse in the country, together with innumerable problems; his wife was played by that virtuoso of the terse and crackling, Jean Dixon. The best of the season's crop was Elliott Nugent's and James Thurber's The Male Animal, because its antics did not evade thoughtfulness. A college professor finds himself defying the stadium-building alumni and trustees, and at the same time is impelled to become the male animal fighting to keep his mate. Herman Shumlin as director made the most of his opportunity for extravagantly comic business, but did not sacrifice the more serious implications of characters and situations. My Sister Eileen was dramatized by Joseph Fields and Jerome Chodorov from Ruth McKenney's tale of two sisters to whose basement room in Greenwich Village come New York's maddest and most amusing characters, keenly observed and pungently acted. Kenyon Nicholson and Charles Robinson drew less comedy than might have been expected from the domestic affairs of a family of trapeze performers, in The Flying Gerardos.

Several plays each year depend for success on the abilities of a single performer, preferably a star with a following. Ruth Chatterton, who long ago established a reputation for charm, spent that quality vainly on John Van Druten's Leave Her to Heaven. Elmer Harris' melodrama, Johnny Belinda, staked everything on the performance of a young actress, Helen Craig, whose playing of a deaf mute was the only thing afterward remembered. Grace George, one of the dependably mellow of our older actresses, revived Kind Lady. Vincent Sheean wrote An International Incident for Ethel Barrymore; its closing after fifteen performances left Miss Barrymore in search of a more sturdy vehicle. In November, she found Emlyn Williams' The Corn Is Green more acceptable as a play and more suitable to her ripe style of acting. The author has told of his own youth in a Welsh mining village, and out of his gratitude toward the modest schoolmistress who set his feet on the path to personal, social and artistic success he has written with warmth and substance. The play is essentially a character-study of Miss Moffat, and, under the masterly direction of Herman Shumlin, Ethel Barrymore plays Miss Moffat to perfection. In the meanwhile, audiences prefer to forget My Dear Children, in which John Barrymore, once a distinguished actor, slapsticked and mugged his way through a tasteless farce which Catherine Tunney and Jerry Horcoin had concocted, its ingredients being the least creditable episodes in the life of the actor himself. John Van Druten's Old Acquaintance provided a vehicle for two stars, Jane Cowl and Peggy Wood, whose combined talents enlivened some but not all of its dull conversational stretches.

Revivals.

No year passes without its revivals either of classic masterpieces or of modern plays which have withstood a few years' testing. Among the latter, Sean O'Casey's Juno and the Paycock is a modern masterpiece of tragic-comic character. From January to April, New York was able to renew its acquaintance with Captain Johnny Boyle and his long-suffering Juno, as Barry Fitzgerald and Sara Allgood played them in a cast which included Effie Shannon and Arthur Shields. Robert Edmond Jones made one of his infrequent appearances as scene-designer for this revival. Burgess Meredith revived Liliom, with Ingrid Bergman as Julie, to discover that Molnar's fantasy had lost some of its hold upon our imaginations. The Players' annual classic revival was Congreve's Love for Love. Its staging was by Robert Edmond Jones at his most distinguished. Its all-star cast included Dudley Digges, Romney Brent, Cornelia Otis Skinner, Dorothy Gish, and Violet Heming. Talented English performers kept Shakespeare alive in the theater with revivals of King Richard II, Twelfth Night, and Romeo and Juliet. Maurice Evans brought Richard back to Broadway for a brief return engagement in April. In November, he appeared with Helen Hayes in Twelfth Night, a production sponsored by Gilbert Miller and the Theatre Guild. Stewart Chancy, who designed its whimsical settings, and Margaret Webster who directed the performance, emphasized the informal, the light-hearted, the playfully comic elements in the play. Within this atmosphere, Helen Hayes was pertly charming, and Mr. Evans presented a crisp Malvolio. When Lawrence Olivier and Vivien Leigh planned their version of Romeo and Juliet, they attempted a youthful, rhapsodic interpretation. In actual performance, under Mr. Oliver's direction, the movement seemed hectic and confusing, the youthfulness rather strident than deeply poetic. Dame May Whitty was, as might have been expected, the perfect Nurse.

Melodrama.

An increasing vogue for melodrama was indicated by Grey Farm, whose leading character, played by Oscar Homolka, struggled against a desire to strangle his own son; the authors were Terence Rattigan and Hector Bolitho. Melodramatic also were the hate-ridden characters and plot of Cue For Passion, by Edward Chodorov and H. S. Kraft. A grisly and pathological story by H. B. Irving came to the stage in a dramatization by Edward Percy and Reginald Denham, in which Estelle Winwood and Flora Robson helped Ladies in Retirement to play for several weeks. In Suspect, with Pauline Lord playing a hatchet murderess, not even the great skill of a fine actress could compensate for the mixture of horror and dullness for which the authors, Reginald Denham and Edward Percy, were responsible.

Serious Drama.

Of plays thoughtfully written on themes of more than temporary or private importance, the chronicler of 1940 finds fewer than usual. Only two playwrights concerned themselves with War — Ernest Hemingway and Robert Sherwood, the former in The Fifth Column, the latter in There Shall Be No Night. Both plays had this in common: the dilemma of the fine spirit who finds noble causes translated into bombs and bloodshed. Sherwood's Dr. Valkonen is torn from his secure intellectual life by the invasion of his homeland; Hemingway's Philip Rawlings recoils from the brutalities of the Spanish conflict; both in the end resign themselves to the role which other forces and other men have assigned to them. The Theatre Guild and the Playwrights Company produced There Shall Be No Night, with scenery by Richard Whorf, and with Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne playing the chief parts. Howard Bay designed the extraordinary settings for The Fifth Column — also produced by the Theatre Guild — and Franchot Tone admirably expressed the torment of Rawlings, with Lee Cobb's superb Max as a foil.

Both Clifford Odets and Elmer Rice have long since demonstrated their insight into city life, their power to characterize men and women who struggle to live decently in Metropolis. In both plays, a girl and a boy find themselves almost but not quite defeated by New York; in both, plot is less important than the response of youth to the brutalities, the betrayals, the challenges of the environment. For Rice's Two on an Island, an offering of the Playwrights Company, John Craven and Betty Field played the boy and girl, while Luther Adler was the Chorus to their hopes and disillusions. Kurt Weill composed incidental music, and Mielziner's 'skeletonized' sets reduced subway trains and beaneries to stark, essential form. The cast of Odets' Night Music included such Group Theater veterans as Art Smith, Philip Loeb, Elia Kazan, Roman Bohnen, Sanford Meisner and Morris Carnovsky; Modecai Gorelik gave his characteristically mordant accent to the backgrounds. Neither play matched such previous works by the same authors as Awake and Sing and The Adding Machine.

Two other plays were American in theme. Medicine Show applied the Living Newspaper technique to the problem of socialized medicine. It was written by Oscar Saul and Hoffman Hayes, and had incidental music by Hans Eisler. Whether through public indifference or because it failed to do dramatic justice to an important theme, it closed at the end of a month, as did Albert Bein's Heavenly Express, in which the author of Let Freedom Ring fused reality with fantasy, and a dead hobo mingled with rough and flavorsome tramps and railway men as the Agent of Death. Boris Aronson's strange settings for this play deserved to be seen by more than a few audiences, as did the acting of John Garfield, Aline MacMahon, Philip Loeb and Russell Collins.

Big White Fog introduced Broadway to a new producing group, The Negro Playwrights Company. Among its sponsors are Langston Hughes, Richard Wright and Paul Robeson; its purpose is to promote race harmony and to interpret the Negro as he is, not as revues and night clubs have portrayed him. Theodore Ward wrote this tragedy, but with less dramatic skill than the occasion demanded. A stirring idea was left in search of the skills needed to impose it upon an impatient and jaded public.

Elmer Rice more than compensated for the weaknesses of Two on an Island by writing and directing Flight to the West for the Playwrights Company. On a westbound Atlantic clipper, half a dozen vigorously characterized men and women discuss the most crucial issue of our time: a Nazi diplomat, a Yankee, a columnist, a business man, a young couple, into whose talk are concentrated not only the conflicts which shake our world, but the steady convictions of the playwright.

Other Plays.

The melancholy roster of outright failures, given in detail, would draw undeserved attention to the names of dramatic contraptions with no good thing to be said for them. Roark Bradford's John Henry and Maxwell Anderson's Journey to Jerusalem could be considered as having prematurely closed. No tears need be shed, however, for George M. Cohan's The Return of the Vagabond (7 performances), Ayn Rand's The Unconquered (6 performances), Another Sun, by Dorothy Thompson and Fritz Kortner (11 performances), Goodbye in the Night (8 performances), Passenger to Bali (4 performances), The Man Who Killed Lincoln (5 performances), Young Couple Wanted (13 performances), G. B. Shaw's Geneva (15 performances), The Burning Deck (3 performances), A Case of Youth (5 performances), The Scene of the Crime (12 performances), Out From Under (9 performances), The Strangler Fig (8 performances), At the Stroke of Eight (8 performances), Russian Bank (11 performances), and The Old Foolishness (3 performances).

Here are sixteen plays involving two hundred and sixty actors, an investment of thousands of dollars, and the top-notch abilities of people like George Abbott, Donald Oenslager, Walter Huston, Cheryl Crawford and Theodore Komisarjevsky; yet the average number of audiences who saw them was eight. Here, for the Season, 1939-40, were the Drama Critics' Circle and the Pulitzer Prize Committee, both finding no more worthy recipient for honors than the charming but aimless Saroyan who wrote The Time of Your Life. Here in the American Theater, a whole year failed to discover a major new talent. That year saw the 'discoveries' of previous ones — Irwin Shaw, Clifford Odets, Maxwell Anderson, writing below their own best level. It employed such gifted artists as Oenslager and Mielziner to design scenery which was dismantled and sent to the warehouse almost before its paint had dried.

Summary.

In the attempt to cushion disaster, ticket prices for plays of average Hollywood quality are raised so high that playgoers prefer the cheaper coziness of the movie palace. At a moment when men face calamitous events with what courage and intelligence they can summon, no voice is raised in our theater either to defend or enlighten. The conventional entertainers trade on their reputation; the innovators of the 1930's imitate Saroyan and fail to distinguish between the confusion and cross-purpose of their make-believe characters and that which is in their own minds. Retreat to Pleasure becomes not only the title of a play but a slogan for an art which, at its best, had and will have more inclusive aims. As the year ends, Hallie Flanagan publishes, in Arena, the history of the Federal Theater, a history which, as she writes, 'points to one dynamic fact, profoundly significant for the future of the stage: that the theater, often regarded even by members of its own profession as dead or dying, still has tremendous power to stir up life and infuse it with fire.'

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.