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Daisy Mayme, middle-aged merchant-maid of Harrisburg, lonesome but always laughing, meets Cliff Mettinger, bachelor, and his orphan niece on the bright shore at Atlantic City. She goes to Cliff's suburban home as the family guest, there to encounter feminine intrigue: Cliff's two sisters eager for his money. During the downpour of a domestic storm, Daisy blossoms forth a late but hardy bride. As usual, Mr. Kelly subordinates action to characterization and dialogue, with the result that his play moves slowly. As usual, Mr. Kelly's protagonists tell Mr. Kelly's antagonists just where, in Kellyese, to get off. As usual, Mr. Kelly's audience grunts acquiescently and audibly, nods knowingly, applauds heartily, gives evidence that it knows these people on the stage as well as Mr. Kelly does and is glad to see that things are turning out as they should. The Three Sisters. Anton Chekhov's play offered at Eva Le Gallienne's Civic Repertory Theatre, constitutes a sufficient justification for that pioneer enterprise. For The Three Sisters is a great drama that could not possibly succeed in a Broadway house. It tells of the dry rot creeping upon a class of Russian society which, for years, has been privileged to do nothing— the petty military, the country landlord. Always the victims struggle to writhe free of the suffocating blankets of their own inertia—in this case, three sisters. They will go to Moscow, where there is life. They will go. But they never do. They just relapse into the tragic, supine, half-dead repose fastened upon them by their traditional weakness. Meanwhile peasant bipod, reddened by centuries of labor, filters in with the drops of dying blue, picks up the burdens—and the authority—that the grand folk slough off. Soon the peasants will be the grand folk.
Anton Chekhov's plots are not exciting. His craft is to introduce, in rambling stage narrative, bits of daily life, dull except to the few who love inspired satire. Theatregoers who seek effortless entertainment are warned to avoid The Three Sisters. So consistently is the mood of restless boredom maintained on the stage that it will surely transmit itself to any half-asleep onlooker. To those who can emerge from the day's fracas of commercial activity with relish for intellectual adventure, The Three Sisters will prove one of the season's delights.
The Noose. Act I: The hero refuses to tell why he killed the burly bootlegger; and the audience wonders why the wife of "The Governor of the State" pleads for a pardon on the grounds that the hero is "more sinned against than sinning." Act II: Cut back to the murder in a sprightly milieu of harlots and bootleggers like that in a prior hit, Broadway* (TIME, Sept. 27). Act III: So the bootlegger murdered by the hero was his f-th-r . . . and the Governor's wife was his m-th-r. . . . Shissh, Shussh! Off with the noose. A neatly meshed plot running smoothly with hokum in all the grease cups.