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Wong is a Chinese character but as crooked as the letter S. He tosses a Caucasian girl behind a secret panel and in the last act gives a party at which there is a fire-eating magician. Also, in the last act, there is the San Francisco earthquake and fire. The plot deals with dope-peddling; Slippery Jim (Robert Bentley) is the chief dope-peddler; he leaves the racket and marries a pure, sweet girl. Wong is killed in the earthquake.
Ruth Shepley plays the sweet girl whom Slippery marries; and theatre-goers with good memories recall The Boomerang wherein Ruth Shepley played another such, spraining her ankle nightly for the furtherance of romance.
Tonight at 12. Practice, it is apparently the conviction of Author Owen Davis, makes the playwright perfect. Nor is the conviction betrayed in this, the latest of more than 250 Davis dramas, wherein a comparatively improbable situation and an unlikely plot are made to seem funny and exciting by turns, owing to smart dialog and skillful construction.
At a supposedly polite dinner party, a Mrs. Keith turns savagely upon her female guests, stating that one of them is her husband's mistress. Someone, it is true, has been making amorous advances through the shrubbery about the house; but, with a sudden burst of self-sacrificial solemnity, Mr. Keith's heir falsely insists that the figures seen en route to furtive passions were those of himself and one of the suspected women's housemaids. This precipitates a semi-tragic interruption of the endearments which had hitherto been passing between the Keith scion and a nice young girl.
Just in time. Author Davis prevents his play from becoming a study of puppy love frustrated. Once more the problem of old Keith's circuit among suburban sirens is brought forward, to stay for a curtain which is as nearly satisfactory as possible. Of a sharp, clever cast, one of the pleasanter bits was done by Owen Davis Jr. as the younger Keith.
Macbeth is a play, not so much of men and women, as of the wind and the darkness, witches and their gloomy cries. It has been played a thousand ways, by actors, steeped in the colors of their trade, unmannerly breached with gore, who bellow and rant, who incarnadine its multitudinous sea of words with bloody sound and fury.
Now it is being played in Manhattan by Lyn Harding (Macbeth) and Florence Reed (Lady Macbeth) in settings by famed Gordon Craig. These settings are the most notable circumstance of George C. Tyler's production; stairs in the castle, rocks along the moor, a road, a cave, a banquet hall—all of them are shadowed by the moods of the play.
Florence Reed has never before played a Shakespearian role though she rehearsed in Hamlet with E. H. Sothern in 1907. She devoted her talents in 1917 to the long continued spectacularities of Chu Chin Chow, wherein Ali Baba and his robbers concealed themselves at the Manhattan Opera House ; hers also was the somewhat wanton Shanghai Gesture.
Best Plays in Manhattan
SERIOUS
STRANGE INTERLUDE—Nine acts of intellectual thunder by Eugene O'Neill and a Theatre Guild cast (TIME, Feb. 13).
MACHINAL—Zita Johann making herself famous in a sombre survey of justifiable homicide (TIME, Sept. 17).