Theater: New Play in Manhattan: Sep. 26, 1938

Come Across (by Guy Beauchamp & Michael Pertwee; produced by George Buchar and John Tuerk with William A. Brady). Opening its eyes later than any theatrical season in a generation, 1938-39 otherwise clung to tradition, woke up with a bad taste in its mouth. Come Across is a tissue-paper “comedy-drama” offering English ideas of U. S. gangsters in an English version of U. S. slang. The scene is a London hospital where a mobster comes with a bullet in his chest and compels an unwilling surgeon to take it out by first kidnapping the surgeon’s little boy. Act I is mostly comedy, which consists of stating a few jokes and then elaborately developing them, like themes in music. Acts II and III are melodrama—absurd, but fairly exciting.

Chief distinction of Come Across: it is perhaps the first English play within living memory where, throughout three whole acts, nobody drinks—or even mentions—a dish of tea.