The Theatre: New Plays in Manhattan: Dec. 11, 1939

Farm of Three Echoes (by Noel Langley; produced by Victor Payne-Jennings in association with Arthur Hopkins). After a great success as a 101-year-old matriarch in Whiteoaks, Ethel Barrymore returned to Broadway last week as a mere chick of 97. At 97, of course, people can do a great many things that would be unseemly at 101, and Actress Barrymore proceeds to do them.

The play does all it can to cooperate. A piece of monstrous twaddle, so old-fashioned as to be almost refreshing, it concerns three generations of a hot-blooded Boer family who live somewhere on the veldt. The husbands systematically bully the wives, and the wives systematically bump off the husbands. Home life, between whiles, is saved from monotony by Satan (who arrives so punctually each day he could just as well deliver the mail), assorted ghosts, the old lady's coffin (which, pending its final function, she uses as a kind of chaise longue), windstorms, shotguns, sluts from the city and the black influenza.

Miss Barrymore refuses to let all this give anybody the creeps. Seldom offstage, and extremely vocal, blunt and racy when on, she plays her role with a huge gusto and humor that never degenerate into caricature. The same cannot be said of Playwright Langley's handling of his plot.

Morning's at Seven (by Paul Osborn; produced by Dwight Deere Wiman). Two seasons ago the Broadway critics threw their hats in the air over Playwright Osborn's On Borrowed Time, a deft piece of flimsy-whimsey about a small boy, an old man, and Death kept at bay in an apple tree. When Osborn's Morning's at Seven opened last week, many more critical thumbs went down than hats went up. All the same, Morning's at Seven is as much better than On Borrowed Time as butter is than margarine.

To be sure, the play hasn't a very giddy or glamorous look. It all takes place in the backyards of two much-curlycued 18901sh houses, and it tells of people who moved into them when they were built. There are four sisters of 65 and upwards, three of them with husbands of 67 or more, the fourth an old maid. Youth is represented by a mama's boy of 40 who has been keeping company for more than two lustrums with a fading moron of 39. To add to its handicaps, the play has scarcely a shred of plot.

But as observant realistic comedy of banal family life, it is probably closer to the U. S. common denominator than Our Town or Life with Father. Much more of this life is skim milk or spilt milk than cream. It is a chronicle of vanishing dreams and growing regrets, of crotchets and quirks, affection and annoyance, gossip and eavesdropping, small skeletons in large closets. It fails to be drab because, at 70, its people are still kicking their heels, raising their voices, cocking their ears. They talk ridiculous bromides, but with passion ; they make absurd gestures, but with feeling. They are for the most part real, and for the most part funny.

The whole thing is perhaps too casual for the stage, which, though always professing to hold the mirror up to nature, yammers if things are not catchily focused, neatly glued together, sharply climaxed. Morning's at Seven not only builds toward very little, but is vagrant in method, minor in tone. It just happens to be amusing, persuasive, lifelike.