The Theatre: New Plays: Aug. 25, 1924

Dancing Mothers—The first play of the season will irritate a lot of people considerably owing to its insistent cheapness and will impress them none the less by its aggressive drama and abnormal ending.

For two acts, the people act just about as all people act in the first two acts of a flapper comedy. The daughter of the house enters carrying a high alcoholic content acquired at a Manhattan bachelor's apartment. The father of the house philanders with females of whom his wife, up to the time her good friend Mrs. Mazareen tells her about it for her own good, knows little. Thereupon the wife lights a cigarette and starts out to plug the domestic puncture by proving that she can be the gayest of the household.

In the process, she unfortunately falls in love with the svelt bachelor who has been clogging her daughter's moral passages with cocktails. The bachelor is further complicated by a somewhat inexpensive lady, who is also tangled into the husband's past. The whole combination assembles and there follow two acts.

Helen Hayes is, curiously enough, the featured player, although the play obviously belongs to the mother part. Mary Young accounted for the latter with flashes of distinction. To the cast and the twisted ending (the dancing mother marries the bachelor), the play owes its claims to serious attention.

The New York Telegram and Evening Mail—"It trips the light satiric—and slows down to a grand march away from Home, Sweet Home."

The Sun—"One of those recurrent comedies written in a state of considerable agitation over the way folks are carrying on these days."

Easy Street.—This particular wife started dying at an early age because, after she told her grandfather that she had sat on his silk hat, he spanked her. One thing led to another and by the second year of her married life she was telling her husband she had been home all day when she really had been to Manhattan and that hats cost eight dollars when they really cost twenty. The husband was stupid but he finally caught up with the parade of prevarications. Thereupon he produced a pistol and waved it around for the better part of an act until he had separately threatened everyone in the cast and all but the upper boxes in the audience. Ralph Kellard, as the husband, brought to this part as full an assortment of plain and fancy sound and fury as it is the misfortune of most witnesses to recall. Finally he did not shoot any one at all and took the wife back to their little paradise-on-the-installment-plan, because he could not order ice and milk. She was a good woman. And had she been as sensible as she was good she would have fanned him with a short, blunt instrument and gone off to live with the other man.

The New York Herald-Tribune—"Abounding in banalities and bromides."

The Sun—"One of those forlorn, home-made pieces which the powers behind the American theatre feel it best we should see and dispose of early in every season."