New Play in Manhattan

The Cup of Trembling (adapted by Louis Paul from his novel Breakdown; produced by Paul Czinner and C. P. Jaeger) is a very exhaustive, and very exhausting, study of a dipsomaniac. It reveals Ellen Croy, a Manhattan newspaper columnist (Elisabeth Bergner), as a driven soul, harrowed by something in her life which she can neither exorcise nor explain. The play follows her step by step, relationship by relationship--boss (Anthony Ross), husband (Millard Mitchell), old friend (John Carradine)--down into the pit. Then it slowly drags her back into the light.

On a psychoanalyst's couch she rummages among her memories--but not very willingly and not very well. Her editor is more of a help when he confesses that he too was once a drunk, and can still barely hold off drinking. A member of Alcoholics Anonymous helps still more.

As a case history, Ellen's story is plausibly chronicled and diagnosed. Omitting no details of the disease or minutiae of the therapy, The Cup not only runneth o'er but is several times refilled. Sensational in spots, the play is remarkably dull as a whole. The trouble is that Playwright Paul knows what he is writing about but not how to write about it. His touch is coarse, his method tedious, his tone didactic; the play becomes a kind of Pilgrim's Progress of drink.

As the violently emotional, unstable, unstationary Ellen, Actress Bergner is skillful, but ultimately exhausting too.

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