Theater: New Plays in Manhattan: May 2, 1927

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Love Is Like That. S. N. Behrman wrote The Second Man (TIME, April 25). Kenyon Nicholson wrote The Barker (TIME, Jan. 31). One is a wise, brilliant comedy; the other, a colorful, throbbing melodrama. In the creation of Love Is Like That, they collaborated. By combining their efforts they seem to have detracted from the ability of both for Love Is Like That tries to impose heroics of romanticism upon comedy of manners, a process automatically self-canceling. What is left are attractive scenery, one or two bits of good acting, a few, isolated, clever lines. Vladimir Dubriski (Basil Rathbone), silky-suave Grand Duke in exile, is tumbled into Manhattan's gaucherie, faced with the dilemma of marrying a bloated divorcee of means or engaging in menial service for a livelihood. In a last act silhouette, he is represented donning his tall high hat, preparatory to sitting elegantly upon the dilemma's second horn.

The Field God. Those who expected Paul Green's second play to be like his first this season, In Abraham's Bosom (TIME, Jan. 17), a contemplation of the North Carolina Negro, may have been surprised to find him now gazing with catholic compassion upon the tragedy of a white North Carolina farmer who marries his niece in defiance of rooted superstitions. Stern Jehovah frowns upon the unorthodox union—their offspring is taken in death, the crops fail. A dying baby is God's revenge. In the end love prevails over the code. The angry blast of the Field God is nullified, theatrically, by long-winded dialogue.

The House of Shadows. This last drop in the season's bucket of mystery plays makes no great splash. It explains a haunted house tenanted by a mad miser. For years he had booed off all visitors until the hero and. heroine dared his confines. Especially unfortunate is the fatty dialogue that weighs the play down with uneventful explanation.

The Comic. It is entirely fitting that a playwright dramatize himself occasionally, especially if he does so with a grin. Lajos Luria, author of The Comic, prefaced this work as follows: "Lajos Luria is the pseudonym of one of Europe's most successful present day dramatists, used by him only when writing comedies and plays of a much lighter vein than his more serious dramatic and poetic works."

But the dramatist should write his comedies with more wit and originality than Mr. Luria, if he hopes to perpetrate a graceful hoax. The Comic fumbles with a situation in which an actor convinces a playwright that a certain scene needs rewriting, by maneuvering the playwright into a nervous predicament with the leading lady. The Manhattan audience was more befuddled than convinced—despite the able performance of Actress Patricia Collinge.

Goat Alley. The fact that all the actors and characters in this play are Negroes lends a flavor of piquancy to what might otherwise be an undistinguished dish of canned melodrama. The heroine is forced by poverty and misunderstanding, from one man's bosom to another's, thereby irritating her husband into catastrophic petulance. He does his beastly best, poor fellow, in the third act, never realizing that deep down she loved him always. "Earnest but crude," said generous critics.