The Theatre: New Plays in Manhattan: Jan. 12, 1931

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Five Star Final is this season's newspaper play. But, unlike its more cynical predecessors, it is an earnest paean of hate directed against tabloid journalism. By the middle of Act II the abuse has become so boundless that it is flogging a dead horse.

The New York Evening Gazette, a publication which could not value circulation more loved it not honor less, has decided to run the story of Nancy Voorhees, who was acquitted 20 years prior for murdering a man who tried to abandon her. As managing editor, it is the task of terse, authoritative Arthur Byron (The Criminal Code; One, Two, Three!) to have Nancy Voorhees sought out, to find what has happened to her. to point an unctuous moral for his readers. It so happens that news of the story breaks on the day that Nancy's pretty but illegitimate daughter is to be married. Griefstricken, Nancy and the worthy man who has married her despite her shame, commit suicide.

Throughout these kinetic happenings (the play uses three revolving stages, 27 scenes) Editor Byron joins Playwright Louis Weitzenkorn in excoriating his profession, justifying his actions on the grounds that "idealism won't put a patch on your pants. I'm one newspaperman who's going to have a comfortable old age." But when he learns of the tragedy his paper has wrought, he tells his publisher what he thinks of him, stalks out of the office with a bitter laugh at himself.

Some of the lines in Five Star Final are unbelievably bad. At one point two colored characters engage in such minstrel show chatter as: "What am a suicide pact?" And a bogus air enters during the scenes in which disillusioned reporters tell each other their troubles. The play has undeniable vitality, however, and provides a good deal of technical information on the inner workings of a gum-chewer sheetlet. Arthur Byron is masterful, makes completely credible the part of a tough, dogged newsman.

Midnight. Last week Theatre Guild subscribers filed reverently through the Guild Theatre's handsome lobby, up the stairs past the bust of George Bernard Shaw and bumped right into a murder melodrama. For Midnight relates the tale of a law-abiding florist (Frederick Perry) who, as foreman of a jury, has sent a woman to the electric chair for killing a man. At the execution, Midnight, while newshawks are invading his home on one pretext or another to catch his reaction, the florist's daughter (Linda Watkins of June Moon) staggers in with a revolver and the tale that she has just shot her lover.

Thereupon the florist's ideas undergo a complete metamorphosis on the subject of capital punishment. He does everything he can to save his child. But Miss Watkins would undoubtedly go to the chair were it not for some impudent but sage political advice which Mr. Glenn Anders (Hotel Universe), as a newspaper reporter, breathes into the ear of the district attorney.

Had Midnight 'any pretense toward dramatic excellence, it would naturally depend on balancing the two similar crimes. But the murder committed by the executed woman is handled with far more clarity than the killing of Miss Watkins' vague boy friend.