(2 of 2)
Claire Adams depicts the Jobian trials of a young newspaperman who is persuaded by his bride to leave spacious Waco, Tex., for a one-room flat in Manhattan. The city's restless vastitude soon undermines his ambition; he is unable to write his novel, is too frequently in need of sleep. Meanwhile his wife experiments with a wealthy fellow, gets in deeper and deeper, is finally implicated in a knife murder which her husband is sent to report. It is a sordid, ordinary tragedy, conceived and acted without much imagination. A Primer for Lovers. Playwright William Hurlbut once concerned himself with such austere subjects as the psychological borderland between religion and sex (Bride of the Lamb). In his newest play austerity has given way to ribaldry, sex is uncomplicated by religion. Manhattan dramacritics hailed it as bald, unblushing. Some of them inclined to consider it dull. This judgment, if you are not lulled to sleep by a series of marches and countermarches in boudoir land, is open to dispute. For despite its tail coats, pajamas and cocktails, the play is a pungent pastry out of the same sort of oven as produced the Restoration comedies.
Unctuous Robert Warwick appears as a wealthy gentleman who yearns after a lovely virgin (Rose Hobart) but gets instead the wife of one of his friends through her own chicanery in a darkened room. This lady's husband is in turn involved with Mr. Warwick's wife and the virgin moves safely toward matrimony with a gracious man-about-town. The bedroom doors are all well oiled; they function silently, ceaselessly. What philosophy the play contains issues from the mouth of matronly Alison Skipworth as a Long Island Wife of Bath. Early in the evening she observes: "There is a spirit of unrest in the air, and one feels the breath of Eros blowing in from the garden." Later she delivers a homily on the piquancy of Victorian underwear. She also says: "I often sit and wonder what one could do nowadays to be declasse."