Theatre: New Plays: Dec. 27, 1926

Hangman's House. Willard Mack, the dramatist, has two other hokum-weighted melodramas currently padding his Broadway income, The Noose and Lily Sue. Compared with them, this third, from Donn Byrne's novel, is a theatrically diseased mess. The story follows the lives of a young country gentleman, Dermot McDermot (Walter Abel) and a neighboring country gentleman's daughter, Connaught O'Brien (Katherine Alexander), both born to the grassy slopes of Ireland, in love with their land, their horses, their people and each other. She is forced to marry a villain who shoots her pet race horse after good old Bart had won the big steeplechase. The race is a childish, ridiculous, clumsy scene, wherein one horse, galloping a mile a minute on a treadmill, was easily outstripped by the gingerly lope of another animal who had only to thread his way across a stationary stage. Later on, the villain commits suicide, and whatever of the audience remains is given explicit assurance that Connaught had never been a wife to him, had never even kissed him, except on the wedding day which does not count.

The Dybbuk. Last week only four plays opened. Two of these were The Dybbuk, and were ushered in by repertory companies.

Brought to Manhattan last year by the Neighborhood Players (TIME, Dec. 28, 1925) this play based upon an old Jewish legend quickly won fame and riches. The "dybbuk" is the spirit of a departed youth. It takes its strange abode in the heart of a Jewess, keeping alive in her perturbed breast the love she bore the spirit when it possessed a body of its own. Priestly folk would exorcise the disturber in the interests of sensible matrimony to a wealthy wooer. But with shrieks and groans the ghostly lover wages a sturdy, though mystical, battle for the lady and romance. With this material the Neighborhood Players present, as they did last year, tense, reverent drama, made as plausibly realistic as the material will permit.

The Habima Players of Moscow offer the same play in Hebrew. Their production is notable for its frank theatricality. Not the slightest regard is paid to ordinary, familiar realities. The players confess themselves actors of parts, paint their faces with unusual pigments in strange designs, interpret their mysterious emotions before impressionistic scenery. As artists detached from the world on the other side of the footlights, they breathe unmistakable intensity into their roles. Anna Rovina, who plays Leah, the body haunted by the restless spirit of her dead lover, is heralded as one of the world's greatest actresses. In gesture and movement, she speaks eloquently to those in the audience with whom she cannot communicate through the medium of language.