New Plays in Manhattan

Women Go on Forever. Since melodrama is what the public wants, Playwright Daniel N. Rub-in-- will give it to them. He lops off a side of Mrs. Daisy Bowman's (Mary Boland) boarding house, where rents are low and hard to collect, to reveal a perfect spawn of loves and murders. Three rooms give on the sitting-room of this squalid pension, each of which by itself is a cell of drama. Many more embryo plots sneak in through the front door, the back door, down the stairway, or just happen in the alleyway outside. They tangle themselves into a swarm of ugly, writhing life, sticky and sordid, grimy with bitter wisecracks and cruelly shot through with flashes of vagrant, tender beauty.

In one of the cells lives a drab old maid with a parrot. To Mrs. Bowman's son (Douglass Mont-gomery), who has groped to young manhood in blindness, the spinster is kind, therefore beautiful. He venerates her as he does his own frowsy mother, who, when he was seven and still had his sight, must have been a golden beauty. His illusion of a pretty, black-eyed inamorata brings his first sex consciousness. It sweeps into his life with bewildering ecstasy, as the music of a symphony orchestra might come suddenly to a chanting savage. Into his world of sound, thus transposed by fancy to a heavenly harmony, intrude the raucous gratings of the boarding house. He hears his mother's paramour beating her. Sound can aim a gun as well as sight. He shoots the man dead. Other murders go on here, too. In another cell a broken-hearted girl is being debauched. Gunmen and detectives prey upon the house. When the smoke clears Mrs. Bowman hangs out her ROOMS FOR RENT sign. Indeed, she has many a vacancy.

If only for the terrific excitement piled up by an artfully intricate plot, the play merits such euthusiastic applause as it received. But being so brilliantly acted and propelling itself out of a dirty, bleeding milieu with such passionately ugly and beautiful intensity, it transcends the merely artful and achieves a gritty realty that is truly great.

Pickwick. The discriminating multitude whose pleasure it is to take snacks of Dickens's Pickwick Papers before going to bed, may enjoy seeing animated illustrations of the book now being exhibited as a play.

Among the episodes which are reproduced with loving care and no more dramatic consequence than is to be found in the Papers themselves, are: the affair at the Inn, where the mad scamp, Alfred Jingle, takes the Pickwickians for -L-120 as balm for releasing his hold upon the elderly spinster of their party; the hunting expedition to which the jelly-bellied Pickwick sallies forth in a wheelbarrow; the court scene in Guildhall where Sergeant Buzfuz (bellowing in the person of Bruce Winston) wins the Widow Bardell's suit for breach of promise against the harassed but philosophical hero.

John Cumberland plays Pickwick. He once used to roll under and from under beds in the parlor- bedroom-and-bath era of U. S. farce, complaining bitterly to his friends of the sad condition of the theatre that necessitated such ig- noble dramaturgy. He now has a more congenial role, but not, prob- ably, for long. Though cartoons of Dickens's narrative have been faith- fully staged, theatre-goers will find themselves bored by what is, after all, only the Pickwick tabloid Papers.*

Good News makes a rattling good musical show out of the ways of Joe College as known to perfect strangers. You see him bursting into sorority houses, hornswoggling the Frosh out of his allowance, necking the co-eds on the steps of the lecture hall. All the joy has fled the campus of dear old Tait, according to the plot, because the star halfback, Tom Marlowe (John Price Jones), has flunked his astronomy just before the opening chorus, two days prior to the intercollegiate crisis with Colton. The heroine, Connie Lane (Mary Law-lor), tutors him for a make-up examination, which he passes--be-cause the professor shows college spirit. One minute to play--the stage darkens and Tom Marlowe is seen tearing off 40 yards against Colton and a treadmill. He fumbles, but by trick playwrighting the fumble is converted into a lateral pass to the leading comedian (Gus Shy, who really is funny). Thus, the game is won; future generations of Tait undergraduates will be able to hold up their heads before the world, and everybody marries in Junior year. George Olsen's band makes the music--in the pit and on the stage. Zelma O'Neal does an educated black bottom, called the campus drag, which explains why some fellows will never, never leave Tait.

Mister Romeo. Taking up with the ladies of the burlesque shows is a lot easier than letting up, is the experience of another doddering Romeo of the farce-ways. J. C. Nugent makes him a pathetic fool, but what really startled the audience was the fact that this poor business was, in part, the work of Playwright Harry Wagstaff Gribble who once wrote a good play, March Hares.

In the Air

Pierre Samuel du Pont, chairman of E. I. Du Pont de Nemours & Co., last week surveyed the completion of one of the most elaborate U. S, open-air theatres. On a slope of his garden at Longwood, Pa., there were turf terrace seats on which 1,200 people might sit; below these a stage winged and backed by boxwood bushes. Under the stage there were dressing rooms, lounging rooms, large-sized bathrooms. In front of the stage, fountains were ready to lift a shining silver curtain of water.

*He wrote a fine tragedy, Devils, which two years ago perished of neglect. --The play had successful short runs last season in Philadelphia, Washington, Boston. It was conceived and written originally by Frank C. Reilly, whose regular business is electric signs, and rewritten by Cosmo Hamilton, British playwright. More than 20 years ago, tall De Wolf Hopper appeared in a woeful musical comedy based on the Pickwick Papers.