Theatre: Old Play in Manhattan: Jan. 2, 1939

Outward Bound (by Sutton Vane; produced by The Playhouse Co.). Seeing an attractive play again after 15 years is usually as disillusioning as re-encountering a once-attractive woman. But Outward Bound comes off better than "well-preserved," still retains its humor, imaginativeness, suspense and its more elusive quality of "theatre." Profound, or even provocative, it never was; the play is effective just because it treats the idea of death simply, concretely, familiarly. The appeal of Playwright Sutton Vane's imagination is not its incandescence or daring, but its deep kinship with Everyman's.

Still teasing and dramatic is Vane's first-act picture of men & women wandering in & out of the smoking room of an ocean liner, some of them not sure why they have embarked, others puzzled about their destination until one of them grasps the fact that they are all dead. Still vivid, if over-typical, are the people themselves: the drunkard (Bramwell Fletcher), the charwoman (Laurette Taylor), the clergyman, the snob, the businessman, the young couple who have killed themselves for love. Still troubling are these people's confusions, hopes and fears as the voyage nears its end and the image of "the Examiner" haunts their minds.

When at last the Examiner comes on board to judge them, the audience settles back to relish the play's meatiest, juiciest moments. But they are also its weakest: the inquisitor is too whimsically conceived, vice is too glibly punished, virtue too sentimentally recompensed. Perhaps a better artist (though a less canny storyteller) would have rung down his curtain as his characters, in bewilderment and trepidation, reached the threshold of their eternal home. It takes at least a Dante to draw a convincing diagram of Hell.