Theatre: New Play in Manhattan: Apr. 10, 1933

The Party’s Over (written & produced by Daniel Kusell). The dramatic saga of the Blakeleys is another addition to the rapidly increasing play cycle about family life in New York City. It is not so pungent a narrative as that which described the Hallams of the Upper West Side (Another Language). In their Park Avenue purgatory, the Langdons of A Saturday Night were more urbane. The Rimplegars of Brooklyn (Three-Cornered Moon) still hold the all time record for dulcet insanity. But the Blakeleys, who inhabit a presentable but unspecified sector, amuse at times.

Mother Blakeley’s chief concern in life is her connection with the D. A. R. Father Blakeley, having neither ancestors nor job, moons disagreeably about the house. Sister Phyllis takes up with a gangling radio crooner (Ross Alexander), marries him during a night out. Brother Clay, Yale sophomore, discovers to his sorrow that the old song was entirely incorrect. He gets a New Haven waitress in trouble.

It is up to Bruce Blakeley (Harvey Stephens) to support and abet his trying tribe. When his business blessedly fails, he evokes not their sympathy but their ungrateful scorn. Whereupon he does what he has been trying to do all the time, marries his divorcée sweetheart (Katherine Alexander, no kin to Ross), rids himself of his family responsibilities. The party, he tells them in a forceful farewell address, is over.