Your Uncle Dudley introduces Walter Connolly as a smalltown sport and civic hero whose services promoting bazaars and festivals have won him a collection of loving cups from the grateful citizenry. This infantile and lovable fellow's desire to marry a. Danish beauty depends on his niece's winning $5,000 in a singing contest. How the prize was lost but Mr. Connolly's bride was won is a story which becomes a bit too long in the last act. It involves, however, some excellent villainy on the part of the niece's mother (Beatrice Terry, niece of the late great Dame Ellen Terry) as well as homely humors by her grandmother (Mrs. Jacques Martin). Mr. Connolly is frequently ludicrous as the thwarted swell who buys a malacca stick but is forced to hide it in his trouser leg until he gets out of sight of his less extravagant relatives.
A Ledge. Four business partners hold a sombre "conference. One of them has stolen some of the firm's securities and the evidence points to the handsome, heretofore spotless Richard Legrange. Bearing in mind the ordeals by fire and water with which savage tribesmen test virtue, the businessmen devise an ordeal by dizziness for Legrange. He must walk from one window to another along a four-inch ledge on the outside of the building which, at that point, is 200 feet above ground. If he falls, his death will be announced as suicide; if he accomplishes the feat the whole matter will promptly be forgotten. Needless to say, Legrange treads the ledge safely, guilty only of shielding a woman's guilt. The harrowing quality of the ledge scene fails to mitigate Playwright Paul Osborn's long, tedious stretches. This idle melodrama is the second presentation of the New York Theatre Assembly which, sponsored by wealthy, smart Manhattanites, exists to present "amusing plays, in an intimate theatre, before a selected audience." A Ledge follows an exceedingly short-lived comedy called Lolly (TIME, Oct. 28).
It Never Rains. What with a Donovan family from Boston who visit a Rogers family in Los Angeles, a subsequent interfamily love affair, and plenty of old jokes about California climate and real estate, the fabric of this play is mere burlap. One shining thread is woven through it in the fat shape of Mrs. Rogers' girlhood suitor who returns wealth, laden with bonbons, declaring: "With me, everything is a message to Garcia!"