The Show-Off. The glib title character is known to all of us, is part of most of us. So intent is he on making a good impression that he generally creates a bad one. He does not realize that people would concede him something in return for a larger concession of silence by him. He buys a $28 overcoat on a $32 salary, sweeps a girl off into matrimony in spite of her family, brings her back to live with her mother, penniless, in the same grand manner.
Borrowing a friend's automobile, he bucks traffic at Philadelphia's busiest corner. Result: one broken arm for a traffic officer, one damaged trolley car, one bent automobile, one gash on the brow for the showoff, one fine of $1,000 for his relatives to pay. "That's the law for you!" he comments. Reverses of fortune and a good lecture from a sister-in-law render him unabashed. At the end the author makes the show-off partly instrumental in bringing a fortune to the family.
Aubrey Piper is a form-fitting part for Louis John Bartels, a new and capital actor. Helen Lowell etches with acid the acrid mother-in-law. Regina Wallace and Juliette Crosby also give meritorious performances in a play that has a place in every home. George Kelly has written a more human document than his satire, The Torch Bearers. The play's constant humor gets under the vest.
Hey wood Broun: "Best of all American comedies—an authentic nugget in this the golden age of the American theatre."
Alexander Woollcott: "An extraordinarily entertaining comedy of Philadelphia folkways, a genuinely indigenous play of American life, salty, humorous, true."
Alan Dale: "The season's comedy topnotch, without any exception."
The New Englander. The Equity Players make another earnest attempt to score, but again fumble the ball. Here is a disorderly study of a New England mother who lets conscience be her guide once too often. Early in life she forgives her husband his daily embezzlement. She helps him make restitution and get an opportunity to steal again. Under her plastic indulgence he smashes a bank, smashes himself, drives a friend to suicide, becomes the complete flop. After his death his grown son peculates too; heredity extends to bond thefts.
The mother decides it's high time to halt the family weakness for defaulting. This time she'll be firm and signal for the police. Her son's sweetheart, whose estate the son has largely defrauded, suddenly decides that jail is none too good for him. (He has just reminded her that her dad killed himself because of his dad, and she resents it.) On the verge of his trial, the son threatens to jump his bail, and the mother kills herself, with some notion of thus straightening out everything. She leaves a trust fund to her son to make restitution. Playwright, Abby Merchant, seems optimistic about the young man's reformation, in spite of having moulded his character herself. The audience is pessimistic.
Katherine Emmet did not suggest very clearly the granite substratum of the mother's character. Louise Huff, recently redeemed from the cinema, played the fiancee. She called her aunt "Ontie," furnished moments of genuine beauty, but appeared somewhat amateurish in her emotional passages. Alan Birmingham, Gilbert Emery and Arthur Shaw labored to inject life into their parts.