New Plays

Goat Song. The Theatre Guild has also snapped its fingers. In the face of the most unsuccessful season the Guild has had since it became established, a play has been produced which must unquestionably fail. Goat Song is a German importation, its symbolism of the severest sort, abstract and corrosive and yet strangely fascinating.

Franz Werfel, the author, is concerned with the blind fling with which the gods dash the cup from mortal lips. Proverb calls it the slip. Werfel does not bother to define it. He is simply eaten up with a gigantic bitterness at a world which is given reason and at the same time irresistible fate, luck or a divinity that rips reason to ribbons. Werfel is annoyed because God has given him just enough sense to understand what an impotent fool he really is. This gloomy abstraction is woven into a play about a wealthy farmer's family to which was born a human monstrosity.* After 23 years of confinement it escaped and became the symbol of a revolt of the beggars. A grim and horribly concluded love story runs somewhat amuck among the episodes of war and death.

The Theatre Guild has staged this weird adventure with all the cunning resources at its command. Alfred Lunt, Lynn Fontanne, Blanche Yurka, George Gaul, Helen Westley, Dwight Frye, Albert Bruning and other notables head an apparently endless cast. Acting, setting and direction are superb. Goat Song can be set down as an inspired attempt to cage within the worldly walls of the theatre an intangible and hopelessly unanswerable abstraction.

Shelter is about a gang of outcasts residing under one of the New York bridges. A saintly hunchback is the central character, and a burly intruding kidnaper the principal flame of drama. It is inefficient.

A Weak Woman. French farce at its brightest and best is herein prepared for your enjoyment. It is played more slowly than the usual French farce and indicates that an ounce of restraint may often be funnier than a dozen door slams. Estelle Winwood and the brothers Ralph and Frank Morgan are the leaders of a singularly competent troupe interpreting the exercises.

Miss Winwood plays a widow, and the brothers two young males in love with her. Ralph Morgan is humble, inefficient and attractive, constructed by the playwright to appeal to the mother instinct of the lady. Frank Morgan is the conquering sort. You will have to see for yourself who wins. No doubt you will be entertained in the process. But if taking the children, remember it is French.

Puppy Love. Anne Nichols, who produced Abie's Irish Rose, has a new one. She did not write it, but from the looks of things she had a lot to do with the rewriting. The farce has all the old tricks you can think of and here and there a new one. It is so synthetic, so obviously manufactured for the easy laugh, that the testy old critics did not like it. Neither did they like Abie's Irish Rose, which has now played some 1,500 consecutive performances in Manhattan. The plot is about a young boy, the girl he loved and the girl's mother, who did not think they were old enough to get married. Maude Eburne, the low comedy maid, is the funniest.

Don Q, Jr. There was only one point of interest about this production in advance. That was the presence of William T. Tilden 2nd in the cast. Mr. Tilden is a tennis player, as invincible in his field as Jack Dempsey is in his. Mr. Tilden has for some time harbored the irresistible desire to be an actor. He has had his wish. He is not a very good actor, again like Mr. Dempsey. But his part is small and the total effect not hopelessly disturbing. The play, such as it was, told of a little newsboy who stole $150 to help a sick friend. One Billy Quinn (aged about 12) played this part with exceptional facility.

Not Herbert. In the old days melodrama stalked the land in all its obvious glory, and nearly everybody was amused for 25-c- an evening. The cinema has changed all that, and a lamentable scarcity of melodrama has followed. The reason is probably that bad melodrama is easy and good melodrama exceedingly difficult. Not Herbert is good if inconsequential melodrama. It is about a jewel robbery on Long Island and a stupid detective. It is garnished with a sharp sauce of satire and played by a good cast.

Hedda Gabler. The Actors' Theatre has decided that old things are best; and that among the best of the theatre's old things is Ibsen. For this celebrated play they have assembled a truly spectacular cast, headed by Emily Stevens and including Patricia Collinge, Frank Conroy, Louis Calhern, Dudley Digges. The combination has returned one of the best evenings in the theatre now available.

There is a certain forbidding majesty about the name of Ibsen, which is likely to frighten good folk away from his plays. Not of course that many of them have ever seen more than one or two. You can get ten devotees of Michael Arlen to one of Henrik Ibsen. A production of Ibsen's work has to be so singularly fine that people are ashamed not to go. Such, on the whole, is this Hedda Gabler.

Magda. Twenty years ago and more this play was the one picked by Duse, Bernhardt and other famous ladies as one of the mightiest opportunities to glitter. It was considered a wise and moving play, daring perhaps, but sound enough to stand it. It is a story of an overbearing German father and a daughter who "went wrong." German domination and daughters going wrong have long since become familiar fare. With the novelty worn off there is a little enduring substance underneath. And a good deal of this was obscured by the vehemence of Bertha Kalich's performance.

*Half man, half goat, it does not appear on the stage. But its shadow appears. And it is heard to bellow.