New Plays in Manhattan
Revelry pokes with ruthless imagination into the secret misfortunes of a President of the U. S. whom theatre-goers found it easy to think of as Warren Gamaliel Harding. The audience sees President "Easy" Markham (Actor Berton Churchill) as a stately tool of politicians who run the nation from a poker table stuck away in a private nook known as "the crow's nest." Because of his unwholesome faith in these cronies, he allows the White House to degenerate into what one of the characters described as an automat ("Because when you want to take something out, you just put in a coin"). When the graft is on the point of being exposed by a Senate investigation, President Markham, broken-hearted by his followers' duplicity, commits suicide, thus saving his own good name and the Party.
The play is annoyingly cut up into a string of episodes darkening the theatre and breaking its spell whenever.the audience begins to succumb to what might have been effective historical drama. It was written by Maurine Watkins, a young woman who last year attracted attention by a sound piece of debunking called Chicago. She took her material for Revelry from the novel by Samuel Hopkins Adams and for local color she went to Washington, moseyed about the lobby halls, chatted with the politicians, pried, snooped, took notes. To see Miss Watkins, whose beauty is fresh and sweet as the first blush of a primrose, one won- ders how she ever accumulated the authentic mass of profanity let loose in her play. Perhaps it is because she once wrote for a Chicago newspaper. Certainly it is not because she studied in Professor George P. Baker's class in dramatic composition at Yale.
Ten Per Cent is just about that successful. It tells about a Jewish butter-and-egg man who plays "angel" to a play so his daughter may be starred. One of the producers is Thomas Jackson, who functions as the detective in Broadway. The Triumphant Bachelor is a
smarty who proves to his married friends that any wife will lose faith in her husband after finding in his coat pocket a note signed "Love, Helen," or "Kisses, Eleanor." Then the bachelor almost gets into a jam with his own fiancee over these same transplanted notes. There are a few bright chips of dialog but they are hidden under a bushel of small talk. The playwright, Owen Davis, is credited with having written more than 100 plays.