Crime and Punishment (adapted by Victor Trivas & Georg Schdanoff; Wolfson & Sherry, producers). Fyodor Dostoievsky's solemn sermon to the effect that murder will out has been dramatized before and will doubtless be dramatized again. This particular adaptation of the Russian narrative is no less sombre than its predecessors. As Raskolnikoff, the impoverished student who murders a woman pawnbroker with the mad idea that money stolen from her will right a number of wrongs, Morgan Farley is about as wretched a figure as "Ma" Lester, the itinerant dustbin of Tobacco Road. Actor Farley rolls his eyes in terror, clenches his palms, bellows fearfully when his conscience begins to get the better of him. He evidently enjoys his part best of all in the final scene of confession in the park.
Obviously, a work which requires of its readers much leisure cannot be presented in other than skeleton form within the conventional stage-time limit. But for those who might regard acquaintance with the bare story of Crime and Punishment as a social accomplishment, its present dramatic version may be recommended as a convenient "trot."
Nowhere Bound (by Leo Birinski; Birinski, Inc., producer) includes in its overstuffed cast characters named Tomski, McTavish, Schwartz, Grasso, Maureen, Basil Oxley, Ipolita Romanescu and A Young Turk. This polyglot crew is traveling involuntarily across the continent in a sleeping car on a special Government train. When they reach Ellis Island they are all to be deported as undesirable aliens. With this novel background, Playwright Birinski manages with considerable grace to produce a number of situations no less novel.
Among the sad collection of foreigners being shipped out of the U. S., only one is glad to be returning whence he came. He is a noted gunman, and the Department of Labor's free ride back to Italy fits his plans perfectly. With his gains of violence he can settle down under an olive tree and live happily ever after. But the gunman's ex-colleagues are loath to have him go. Two of them board the train, quietly pass the word among the passengers that, as witnesses to a murder, their stay in the U. S. will be indefinitely lengthened. After the murder, Nowhere Bound rather surprisingly turns from pretty good melodrama to pretty good farce.