Theatre: New Plays in Manhattan: Apr. 30, 1928

him. "(WARNING: him isn't a comedy or a tragedy or a farce or a melodrama or a revue or an operetta or a moving picture or any other convenient excuse for 'going to the theatre'—in fact, it's a PLAY, so let it PLAY; and because you are here, let it PLAY with you. Let it dart off and beckon to you from the distance, let it tiptoe back and snap its fingers under your nose, let it sweep up at you from below or pounce down on you from above, let it creep cautiously behind you and tap you on the back of the neck, let it go all around and over and under you and inside you and through you. Relax, and give this PLAY a chance to strut its stuff—relax, don't worry because it's not like something else—relax, stop wondering what it's all 'about'—like many strange and familiar things, Life included, this PLAY isn't 'about,' it simply is. Don't try to despise it, let it try to despise you. Don't try to enjoy it, let it try to enjoy you. DON'T TRY TO UNDERSTAND IT, LET IT TRY TO UNDERSTAND YOU)."

With this fanfare printed on the program, it was not unnatural to expect that him would be a totally tasteless bread pudding of the theatre, containing not even a raison d'etre. Such was what some of the critics who attended its initial performance discovered it to be: not quite sure whether the play had been successful in its attempt to understand them, they wrote scornful words which the box-office at least could not fail to find intelligible. Others, undeceived by the play's pretenses, by its dreary smut, by its fairly frequent lapses into complete and trite absurdity, by long stretches in which author e. e. cummings had obviously fallen into the immature fallacy of trying to tell all about Life in a single paragraph, found partially concealed in its three spasmodic acts many specimens of acute and mordant understanding as well as a fair quantity of ribald wit.

him is a sometimes startlingly successful effort to tell about the complicated agonies that go on inside of a character called Him and a girl called Me. When the focus on this effort is lessened, people on the stage sing "Frankie and Johnny" with splendid effect; homosexuals make their most blatant appearance on the Manhattan stage; three old ladies called "weirds" talk about a pet hippopotamus, saying "It's toasted but it died." On the whole, him is an interesting, well acted and ambitious failure. Author e. e. cummings (his own lower cases) is also the author of a bitter and unwholesome book about the War, The Enormous Room, and of many poems, some of them good, some of them bad.

Forbidden Roads. This was brought from Spain and played by able U. S. actors; its purpose to elucidate, for sly and shifty playgoers, that shining abstract, Honor.