Page:The New Yorker 0002, 1925-02-28.pdf/15

BOYS, boys, what a week in the theatre this last naughty, naughty Witch Doctor such a mad on them.) one has been. Fun! Well, we thought we'd They are to die "before the big rain," one after die, and it would have been just that much vel- another, the hero, played by Mr. James Rennie, last vet, too. Those two plays, alone, which were pro- of all. No sooner is the curse pronounced than actors duced last Monday and Tuesday nights respectively begin dropping like Aies, and, if the author had only would make it a week in dramatic history that should done right by the idea, you would be just as absorbed be marked with a white stone. Or if the week isn't, as the hero in his endeavors to guard the health of the then the playwrights ought to be. gentleman whose turn comes just before his own. The dramas are, reading from right to left, "Cape But it is quite wonderful how you don't care. Smoke" and "Houses of Sand." And if they aren't a Maybe, though, this is not entirely the playwright's couple of little rascals, we are an Eagle Scout. If fault; maybe it is that all suspense is removed by your you will just keep the same seats and put away those inner certainty that, with the scarcity of good actors sling-shots, we will tell you all about them, and then these days, they couldn't possibly be such fools as to where will you be? let anything serious happen to Mr. Rennie. You "Cape Smoke"-we gathered that the title is taken always know that everything is going to turn out just from the name of a drink, but we are open all night dandy, and he will go safely home to Dorothy Gish, to argumentis a melodrama with the South African at the end, veldt as its locale. We are among those who are al- The management has inserted a pleading note in ways in favor of anything the scene of which is laid the program, asking you not to tell how the play ends, in South Africa. Give us a play that starts with a no matter how much your friends tease you. We group of nostalgic Englishmen-of good family couldn't, therefore, give away the big surprise of the sitting about in white suits, cursing the heat and drink- last act: but—you know how we are with a secret- ing themselves to death, and the thing gets into our if you ask us pretty, maybe we will whisper just a blood to that degree that we begin making big plans word to give you an idea of it. "Terrible" would be to give up the struggle and go native. "Cape Smoke" our selection. begins like that, and we were all set for the hap In response to cheers, on the opening nght, the piest evening we had had for, in round numbers, these author made a speech stating that he had been working many months. on "Cape Smoke" since 1908. History has been made, And then something during those—just a minute, democratic. Pardon our pointing, seventeen years; wars have racked but it the author, Mr. the world, kingdoms have crashed Walter Frost. Given a perfectly The New Plays to ruin, genius has waved high its grand melodramatic idea, he has Exiles. At the Neighborhood. James torch, our bathroom ceiling has turned out a play that leaves you Joyce's only play. been fixed. And through it all, as free from thrills as if you were there has sat Mr. Frost, biting his at home in your own bed. CAPE SMOKE. At the Martin Beck, Occasionally, by peering around An incredibly noisy melodrama of pencil and thinking up such lines crime in South Africa, thus filling : as "I was never more serious.” the close-studded ham of the dia- long Veldt wont. There is grave doubt that the logue and the situations, you can week's other gem, "Houses of NATJA. At the Knickerbocker. One catch tantalizing glimpses of that Sand," written by Mr., Mrs., or noble original notion. Four men, of those musical comedies, but with Miss G. Marion Burton—lay you music by Tschaikowski. three villains and the hero, are eight to five it's Miss—will still HOUSES OF SAND. All the Hudson, cursed by a native Witch Doctor. be on exhibition at the Hudson "Brown of Harvard" and "Madome (Perhaps it was that we had come Butterfly" stirred together to sweeten Theatre when these few poor direct from the cold street into to taste. But whose? scraps meet your eye. There was the cozy Martin Beck Theatre, or that about it which made those perhaps it was that we became lost TANGLETOES. At the 39th Street. An unintentionally funny play, about gathered quietly at the bedside on in the shadowy corrdors of expo- an ex-chorus girl in the suburbs, who the night it was born realize it sition at the beginning of the goes desperately back to the white was not long for this world. play; but at any rate the Sand- lights when her young husband gets For it was the sort of race man came to call, and so it was a poem published in the "Bookman." drama in the last act of which that we never did grasp just what Mr. Paul Kelly turns out to have the boys had done to give the Japanese blood.-- Last Night went was Digitized by Google