Theatre: New Plays: Sep. 22, 1924

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Southern town is assigned, for her first client, a horse thief. It evolves that the client is her father, and that he has been stealing horses all his life to provide her, anonymously, with a competence. A deep-dyed district attorney ferrets out the facts and offers to absolve the prisoner if the daughter will make the horse thief his father-in-law. Eventually, everybody confesses; and amid a good deal of weeping the hardy hero of the entertainment takes the heroine into his arms and the thief is somehow exonerated.

Ann Harding, the blondest actress in the world, forgot her Southern accent after the opening minutes, and gave a generally mechanical performance which disappointed those who witnessed her brilliant playing in Tarnish last season. George Marion was moderately successful as the soft-spoken kidnapper of horseflesh.

Burns Mantle—"One of those coincidental plays steeped in sentiment."

Gilbert W. Gabriel—"So mortifying is this situation to parent, child and all others concerned that, during the second intermission, a vendor stationed cannily close to the Vanderbilt Theatre's doorway did a rushing business in Birth Control Reviews."

High Stakes. It is more or less generally known that A. H. Woods (bedroom man) had Lowell Sherman on his hands and nothing for him to do. Willard Mack was therefore summoned and directed to fashion a play to Mr. Sherman's talents. High Stakes is the result, and for anyone who knows the type of thing that Mr. Mack and Mr. Sherman depend upon for their existence, the result would almost inevitably be High Stakes.

Lowell Sherman is occupied as a playwright and wit. Since his plays.are not produced, he depends upon his wit. Slashing about him with his wit, he manages to save his elderly and wealthy brother from the designs of a childlike and quite unscrupulous young woman. Lacking a love interest, the dramatist supplied the elder brother with a beautiful stenographer who was portioned off to Mr. Sherman in the due course of these proceedings

The critics were unkind to Mr. Sherman. Mr. Sherman took the opportunity to repay in unkindness their disparagement through curtain speeches during the opening week.* These efforts failed entirely to undermine the position of these critics with their respective editors, and likewise availed not at all toward making Mr. Sherman a good actor. It would take a lot more than curtain speeches to make Mr. Sherman a good actor; and among the first essen- tials would be a better play than High Stakes.

Percy Hammond—"She [Phoebe Foster] and Wilton Lackaye adorned the ribald cemetery of High Stakes with many artistic asphodels. . . . It is a cheap and, no doubt, prosperous entertainment.

The Mask and the Face. Returning voyagers from London reported favorably on this adaptation from the Italian comedy of Luigi Chiarelli. The Frohman Company contracted for Somerset Maugham to do a special version; but another producer slipped ahead of them with the lines as London heard them. William Faversham was summoned to play the lead, and the production was pressed hurriedly into shape. The result was decidedly depressing. The story: A man banished his wife for suspected incontinence, was acquitted of her murder and remarried her (figuratively) at her funeral. The cast, including Mr. Faversham, were received without hosannahs.

Alexander Woollcott—"The most important