Theatre: New Plays in Manhattan: Nov. 19, 1928

A Man with Red Hair. As everyone who read Hugh Walpole's book knows, A Man with Red Hair concerns a self-immolating masochist whose philosophy is that pain gives power to the pained, makes the sufferer like unto God. Mr. Crispin learned the philosophy from his father who had tortured him as a boy. At Westminster he was different. His flamboyant red hair, pudgy hands and a distorted face which bespoke a grotesque mind, made him different through life. A man of wealth, he indulged his idiosyncratic taste for cruelty and his incongruous love of good etchings. He liked to choke old ladies. He cut the tongues from the mouths of his three Japanese servants. Mr. Crispin has a son whose father-fixation is so unshakable that he agrees to be the nominal husband of a girl whom Mr. Crispin wants to torture. An impulsive young Englishman who loves her, plots to rescue her from the Crispin home. He is aided by an ineffectual young American (who supplies the only comic relief by frequent, skillful references to Baker, Oregon, "a place in America," where he has two sisters, Hetty and Jane, "good girls"). Apprehended, the Englishman is bound by the wrists, his back is used as an etching-plate, upon which Mr. Crispin cuts with a surgical scalpel the likeness of an ass. The American is subjected to mental torture. But just as Mr. Crispin, drawing on a surgeon's blouse, is about to consummate his fiendish plans for the Englishman, the American and the girl, the three dumb Japs, squealing laughter from tongueless mouths, have their own revenge. This is the last scene and is the most thrilling in a season which has tried very hard to provide thrills. Edward G. Robinson (Mr. Crispin) and his Garrick Players did well.

Hotbed. It is the conviction of those who write plays for Broadway that Puritanism is not a state of mind but a vice; thus they attack it with knives and reformatory fury, instead of explaining it. Hotbed, like Revolt a week ago. deals with a blue-nosed divine, the Rev. David Rushbrook. The scene of his hypocritical virtuosities is a college this time, for Author Paul Osborn himself has been a pedagogue. An assistant professor seduced the Rev. Rushbrook's daughter, after drinking whiskey.

The acting in Hotbed is enough to make it somewhat exciting. William Ingersoll is the bad goodman, Alison Bradshaw his daughter, and Richard Stevenson the assistant professor detected in a process of seduction.

This Year of Grace was heralded by fanfares, tuckets and sennets such as seldom announce anything less than the birth of a Prince of Wales or the entrance of Lit-tul Lillian Leitzel. Trans-Atlantic commuters who saw its opening at the Pavilion Theatre in London were reduced to choked, ecstatic finger-tip kissing in their attempts to relate its manifold charms. Jesse Matthews, they ultimately gasped, sings "A Room with a View." . . . Tillie Losch's fluttering hands, fanciful feet . . . brilliant . . . divine.