Theatre: New Plays: Sep. 22, 1924

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role of all fell to an actor for whose tricks and manners on the stage we find it increasingly difficult to suppress our complete lack of enthusiasm."

Percy Hammond—"As disheartening an episode as the drama lovers have suffered this season."

Conscience. A new playwright and a new actress combined to furnish the single notable item in the dramatic column of the week. Don Mullally contributed the play and Lillian Foster, trained in Western stock companies, provided her precisive technical ability and brilliant personality. It was Miss Foster's first start in the great Manhattan handicap. Unless signs fail, she will return to win many races.

The play taken all through was not so satisfactory as the actress, but such of it as was good was so good that finer things can be expected of Mr. Mullally. He opens his play in a Yukon cabin, torments his leading man with memories, switches him back to the day when he left his wife alone because it was required of him to go to jail. The wife, driven to the easiest and yet the hardest means of livelihood, was entertaining a visitor when he returned. He murdered her.

Stark Young—"Lillian Foster . . . shades of feeling and grades of reaction she got without a break in the emotional movement."

Alexander Woollcott—"If the first audience did not precisely tear the engine from her taxicab and drag the cab to her hotel, at least it rose and cheered her to the echo."

The Best Plays

These are the plays which, in the light of metropolitan criticism, seem most important:

Comedy

COBRA—A thumping play causing the staring eye and the flushed brow, stirring up considerable expert excitement over the discovery that Eve is still the temptress.

THE MIRACLE—Showing with almost barbaric splendor how the woman paid even as far back as the medieval mystery play.

THE SHOW-OFF—Wherein a ringing and considerably amusing slap is taken at the loud mouth.

FATA MORGANA—The Theatre Guild's comedy by Ernst Vajda in which Emily Stevens does much able acting in the pursuit of one night of love.

SWEENY TODD—An old English melodrama dripping with blood and played seriously to gorgeous burlesque effect.

EXPRESSING WILLIE — Zoe Akins' deft development of the incompatibility of artistic temperament and the tired business man. The thin spots comfortably padded by a brilliant cast.

THE WEREWOLF—A satirical discussion of incontinence expertly played by Laura Hope Crews, Marion Coakley and Leslie Howard.

Drama

WHITE CARGO — A severe study in sex and loneliness that has kept an obscure uptown playhouse busy for over 300 nights.

WHAT PRICE GLORY — A comedy of manners among the U. S. Marines at the front in 1918. The best of the new season

HAVOC—An English War play of moderate distinction made worthy chiefly by an expert cast from London.

CONSCIENCE—Reviewed in this issue.

RAIN—Jeanne Eagels once more in our midst with her diatribe against the South Sea missionary.

Musical

Returning winter colonists are principally interested in the following music and hilarity: Kid Boots, Rose-Marie, The Dream Girl, Chariot's Revue, The Passing Show, I'll Say She Is, The Grand Street Follies, Ziegfeld Follies, George White's Scandals, Stepping Stones.

The New Pictures