New Plays in Manhattan

Merrily We Roll Along (by George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart; Sam Harris, producer). "What are you having?" a young man at Richard Niles's party asks Julia Glenn (Mary Philips) in the first scene of this play. Too bored to hand him her glass, she says: "I'm having not much fun." The acts that follow explain why not only Julia Glenn but Richard Niles (Kenneth MacKenna),the successful playwright who is her host; Althea Royce (Jessie Royce Landis), the aging actress who is his wife, and most of the other members of the large cast fail to enjoy themselves.

The second scene shows what happened in a smart restaurant seven years before the Niles party. Richard Niles punches the face of his friend Painter Jonathan Crale (Walter Abel) for implying that, by marrying Althea Royce, he is prostituting his talent. The third scene, a year before the second, shows how Richard Niles got involved with Althea Royce in the first place and how he treated his old friends when he first got rich. The fourth goes back a little farther and starts to unravel the story of Richard and his first wife, Althea and the producer she deserted when she met Richard. By the time Merrily We Roll Along reaches Act III, Scene 3, Richard Niles is a blithe young valedictorian proudly spouting to his college classmates on the subject of ideals. "I give you the words of Polonius," he squeaks, " 'To thine own self be true. . . .'

The method of telling a story backward is not new, either in fiction or on the stage. Merrily We Roll Along rolls along considerably less merrily after the end of the second act when it has become completely apparent that the tragedy which Authors Kaufman and Hart are unveiling with such deliberate irony is the old and familiar one of an artist turned successful hack. Superbly staged by Kenneth MacKenna's brother, Jo Mielziner; superbly acted by the biggest cast seen in a legitimate Broadway production this season, Merrily We Roll Along is an amusing and affecting study of interesting peewees, ornamented brightly by cartoons of genuine saloon celebrities and honest wisecracks. Asked if he has the morning paper Jonathan Crale becomes indignant. "I don't take a morning paper," he snarls. "Does Hearst buy my paintings?"

Small Miracle (by Norman Krasna; Courtney Burr, producer) attempts, with considerable success, to make a Grand Hotel of the lounge in a Manhattan theatre. In the narrow space between the Men's Room and the Ladies' Room are packed a half-dozen plots and subplots. There is the harassed man whose wife is having a baby, the callow collegian who gets caught lying to his sweetheart, the burly youth who finds it embarrassing to have just married a scrawny dowager, the bewildered old couple from the country. There is, too, the graciously unfaithful wife (Ilka Chase) who discovers that her lover is a cad. An earnest coatroom attendant, who has got mixed up with one of the girl ushers, steals Miss Chase's diamond pin to pay for an abortion while his devoted fiancee, aware of his predicament, is needlessly surrendering to her employer to get the money.

Best acting and direction are reserved for the central story, concerning Tony Mako (Joseph Spurin-Calleia), a deadeyed, neurotic murderer who attends the show handcuffed to a detective because their train leaves late. Tony wants two things: to see the little man who betrayed him dying at his feet; then to drop dead himself. He gets both wishes. One or two of Small Miracle's side excursions are gratuitous and one or two are trite, but the tangled threads never slip out of the capable hands of Director George Abbott. The net effect is as pungent and authentic as the gunpowder smoke that clouds the stage in Act III.

Few minutes before the play's end a pert usher in a pert brown cap and close-fitting brown bodice utters her first and almost her last line: "Gee whiz, Mae was like delirious. She kept laughing and saying it was a big joke. Her baby's got no father." The pert usher is played by Jean Bellows, daughter of the late great Artist George Bellows.

Jean Bellows was born in Manhattan 19 years ago. Eight years ago Cinema Director Richard Boleslavsky saw her in an amateur play, gave her a part in The Scarlet Letter. Her professional stage debut was at Glen Cove, L. I. in something called Episode Limited. Last year she played summer stock at Woodstock. This year she tried to get a job in Merrily We Roll Along by daily visit to the office of Sam Harris' general manager, leaving each day a slip of blue paper bearing information about Jean Bellows. Not until the tenth slip did she mention that she was George Bellows' daughter. Of her father she once said: "I'm his best work of art." Her inconspicuous appearance in Small Miracle is her first in Manhattan.

The Distaff Side (by John Van Druten; Dwight Deere Wyman and Auriol Lee, producers). This quiet study of womanly nobility serves chiefly to break the monotony of dirty but dull plays which all but engulfed the Broadway stage last month. In it Sybil Thorndyke, Dame Commander, Order of the British Empire, returns for the first time in 24 years to the U. S.

Dame Sybil in The Distaff Side is the keystone of an upper middle-class family of women. To her ancient and churlish mother (Mildred Natwick) she shows unremitting forbearance. To her fretful and uncertain sisters and daughter she imparts a philosophy distilled from long and loving communion with her late husband. One by one problems are solved. The daughter (Viola Keats) leaves the man who can further her ambitions for the man she loves. One sister (Estelle Wynwood) foregoes an unseemly dalliance, returns to the old romance that time has almost staled. The other sister (Viola Roache) finds it easier to accept the un eventful round of housewifely existence In the end Dame Sybil prefers her own tranquil solitude to another marriage.

What keeps The Distaff Side from slip ping into mawkishness is Sybil Thorndyke who seems to imbue her acting with a extraordinary personal warmth and to make the play a cameo-clear portrait of a fine and gracious woman.

Spring Song (by Bella and Samuel Spewack; Max Gordon, producer) shows the misfortunes which overtake the Solomon family, Ma (Helen Zelinskaya), Tillie (Frieda Altaian) and Florrie (Francine Larrimore) when Ma refuses to give Florrie $10 to go to Asbury Park. Deprived of a chance to see her own beau, Florrie goes out with Tillie's. The result of this excursion is a baby and a shotgun wedding. By the time the baby arrives, it is plain that in trying to make her daughters do the right thing, Ma Solomon has made bad matters worse. Florrie's beau marries a wench. Tillie is embittered by her disappointment. Florrie dies despondently in childbirth. Only Ma's old friend, the Butcher Freiberg (Joseph Greenwald) maintains his customary calm, wagging his head as he reads Hebrew prayers in the Solomon parlor.

The fact that Spring Song belies its gay title does not indicate that its intent is fraudulent. It is a sad, but honest anecdote, wisely acted and quietly written, in which Francine Larrimore, tending the Solomon sidewalk cigar stand with puzzled petulance, gives her best performance since Brief Moment. No less genuine than Florrie as self-respecting tenement dwellers are Ma Solomon, and Butcher Freiberg who, when asked for an explanation of the Solomons' misfortunes, voices the dry, dialectic theme of Spring Song: "When you are young, you expect everything from life. When you get older, you expect nothing, and you get it."

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