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Up the Line is the current Harvard Prize Play. Taking the in teresting character of a working hobo, the fascinating theme of wanderlust, Playwright Henry Fisk Carlton scrambles out a play that, seemingly, is bound for nowhere in particular. Slug, a roving farmhand, marries a hired girl. She shrinks from announcing to him the expected advent of Slug Jr., wherefore he, unhampered by consciousness of impending paternal responsibilities, takes to the high road once more. When he returns after seven years, he discovers his daughter (surprise!) and his former wife in the home of another man, a sedentary creature who has taken on the domestic burdens for the entire period, is entitled, therefore, by law, to permanent possession of both woman and child. So Slug roams off again. Louis Calhern makes him a most engaging wanderer.
La Locandiera. Goldoni's "classical" 18th century Italian comedy is sandwiched in between the more substantial fare of tragic offerings ordinarily provided at the Civic Repertory Theatre.* La Locandiera, the Mistress of the Inn (Eva Le Gallienne) breaks through the crust of a woman-hater, the cavalier Ripafratta, finds him quite soft inside, then jilts him and marries her headwaiter. An old play, it is presented with all its venerable tokens of age (soliloquies, asides, good and evil characters) yet not subjected to the snickers of sophisticated production.
Mozart. What palpitations of the heart are inspired in worldly Pari sian ladies by the virginal naivete of a blooming youth is the theme of Sacha Guitry's† play. Interest is added by making that youth Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, whom history has already surrounded with romance and pathos.
The production disappoints. Irene Bordoni, brilliant, charming in her own, more Aphroditian sphere, as a young man, indifferent. Masculine naiveté differs from the feminine: it exacts of an actress a talent at least equal to Maude Adams'. The lines have either suffered in translation or the good people of London and Paris, in their enthusiasm for glorifying Mozart, read a great deal into them. One or the other may explain why the play succeeded on the Continent while failing to stir the North American emotions. The music by Reynaldo Hahn is undistinguished.
Young Wolfgang goes back Salzburg in the end with a tidy score against the French husbands.
John Anderson: "The Beauteous Bordoni, plush-pantied . . . idled about in ... a star vehicle which drama is on leave of absence."
*Other plays produced this season by this organization: Chekhov's The Three Sisters (TIME, Nov. 8), Benavente's Saturday Night (TIME, Nov. 15), Ibsen's The Master Builder (TIME, Nov. 15), Ibsen's John Gabriel Borkman (TIME, Nov. 29). Prices range from 50 cents to $1.50.
†Famed actor-author-manager, husband of famed Comedienne Yvonne Printemps; son of the great actor-manager Lucien Guitry. M. Sacha Guitry's dramas appear on the stages of every land including the Scan dinavian.