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Peggy Wood, gracious musical comedy star turned serious actress, is a decorative but not always decisive Portia. The show was launched by Winthrop Ames, producer of many a notable endeavor.* It was as usual in true taste, but not always blood spotted with despair or dreamily alive with the enchantment of the poet's songs of love.
A Distant Drum. Marrying for money is generally regarded as reprehensible, while taking the money without the oath of office is even more severely criticized. Such criticism was finally leveled at the hero of this enterprise, in the form of a gun in the hand of an irate husband. Meanwhile he had been earning a large salary by agitating various affluent females. Finally he fell unexpectedly in love. The gun went off and shot him through his softened heart.
Equipped with gentle batteries of wit. industriously served by Louis Calhern and a good cast the play pleased a minority. Its final tragic act fitted badly the irresponsible beginning.
The Silver Box. More than 20 years before he reached his present dramatic dexterity, famed John Galsworthy, with a problem buzzing under his bonnet, like a bee, wrote this play. The silver box, a receptacle for cigarets, is stolen by a rebellious drunkard, Mr. Jones, to express his antipathy toward the upper classes who have deprived him of the privilege of working for a living. His wife, a charwoman, is suspected of the theft; but before the case reaches court, it becomes obvious that the true culprit is vapid young John Barthwick Jr. who, in a state of supreme inebriation, had been assisted into his father's home by Mr. Jones, thereby allowing the latter the opportunity for his theft. The last act, a trial scene, allows rich young Barthwick to go unpunished for this and more serious misdemeanors while Mr. Jones is sentenced to a month of hard labor.
Nowadays, it is often Mr. Galsworthy's method to propound a question without answering it, a method of which the virtues are herein made obvious by contrast. Nonetheless, there are occasional moments when the play achieves the warm pungence of its author's later works; these are often fumbled by the minor members of the cast but never by Isobel Elsom who plays Mrs. Jones or by James Dale who plays her husband with a loud and feline cockney accent.
Mirrors. What novelists and playwrights, to say nothing of the rocking-chair crowd, owe to the younger generation for material will never be accurately computed. There seems always to be just one more complaint to be voiced. This time it is a smart suburban district festering from the flask infection on its young men's hips. These young people kiss each other a good deal. For these things they would be presumably damned were it not for one among them who was pure. She shows the path to sobriety, sweetness, light. A little child shall lead them. She had to, because all the mothers and fathers went out drinking and necking even more earnestly. There lies the moral. Nice old father and mother were out getting drunk, playing naughty and picking up a nasty collection of nervous breakdowns. This is a play that no drinking mother should miss.