Theatre: New Play in Manhattan: Apr. 10, 1939

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The Philadelphia Story (by Philip Barry; produced by The Theatre Guild Inc.) shows: 1) Katharine Hepburn back on Broadway after years in cinema; 2) Philip Barry back at smart comedy after his cosmic flight in Here Come the Clowns; 3) The Theatre Guild back in the money after a season of disastrous flops.

The play is a kind of pious froth about an attractive Main-Line Philadelphia society girl with a high and historic sense of her own importance. After a first marriage that crashed because she behaved like a Moon-Goddess instead of a wife, she is about to make a second marriage (with the wrong man) in the same holier-than-thou manner. On the eve of the wedding, various well-wishers file by to tell her what an impossible little prig she is. But it remains for an agin-the-rich magazine writer from Destiny (sister publication of the picture-magazine Spy and of "brief, bluff, belligerent" Dime) to queer the marriage, convert the girl and be converted in turn. In the course of a little drunken midnight swimming in the nude, he teaches her that lots of nice people are human, she teaches him that lots of rich people are nice.

Though the theatre has promulgated more staggering truths in its time, Playwright Barry's little fireside mottoes are neatly and trimly framed. Smart, gossipy, wisecracking, full of family jokes about fashionable Philadelphia and other Biddle-dee-dee, the nearest The Philadelphia Story comes to tragedy is the paralytic stroke suffered by the plot at the end of the second act. Though not up to Barry's best trifling, the play provides an entertaining evening, thanks to gay, lively dialogue and Actress Hepburn's amazing aptness for her role.