Theatre: New Plays in Manhattan: Aug. 19, 1929

It’s a Wise Child. Many are the ways in which a girl can rid herself of a distasteful fiancé. One of the simpler and more startling expedients is to tell him that she is with child. Joyce Stanton (Mildred McCoy) makes this strategic confession to G. A. Appleby (Harlan Briggs). Of course it is untrue—she is inspired by the plight of the family’s housemaid. Appleby is much older than she and, though he is the town’s richest and noisiest citizen, his love-making under the trees is too unctuous for pretty, sensitive Joyce. Her falsehood also reveals that the young college hockey player whom she thought she loved is not so ardent as he seemed. James Stevens (Minor Watson), the tweedy young family lawyer, meets the issue by claiming to be the prospective father. He has loved Joyce all along and now proposes marriage. She blissfully agrees, and has the girlish pleasure of telling him that she is still virgin. In the meantime a huge, philosophic iceman has similarly forgiven the errant housemaid and taken her to a priest. What he refers to as the “escopode” is thus nobly closed.

There are many other tangled emergencies in Laurence E. Johnson’s farce.