Meteor. The eyeballs of Alfred Lunt appear to contract with mad fixity of vision as he seethes through the part of Raphael Lord, adventurer and egoist extraordinary. Having hobnobbed with Central American banditti and other peculiar and remote persons, Lord appears at a New England college, drawn by the writings of one of its dead professors, but leaves almost immediately, enraged with the pedantic stagnation of the place and bearing away with him the vivid daughter (Lynn Fontanne) of the great teacher. Having learned of the weak heart of her other suitor, a mighty footballer, Raphael has spurred the athlete's rage and brought about his death.
His subsequent career begins like the dream of every oil prospector. With intuitions and talent for analysis so acute that he really believes it to be second sight, he makes millions. Simultaneously the other things that he has valued escape him. Leisure and its cultural by-products are first to go. His ruthlessness compels awe but defeats friendship—when the liquid, lovely costume of his wife is much admired by guests, he exclaims: "I made her buy it!" At length his boasted gift of prophecy fails and while the newsboys hawk the story of his downfall, his wife comes to him, offering her humble adoration to meet the new humility which she expects him to have found. But the man's egoism is pounding within him—he casts her aside as he prepares again to assail his rivals, a savage, solitary, tragic figure with nothing left but his will-to-power.
Playwright S. N. Behrman. whose frolicsome plays (The Second Man, Serena Blandish) were admirable, does not use ponderous syllables to transmit his new solemnity. His idiom is rapid, keen, unfailingly dramatic. For Alfred Lunt he has provided another personal success with perhaps the most picaresque role of his career. For the Theatre Guild, smarting from the rebuffs given Karl and Anna and The Game of Love and Death, he has made the season happier.
Death Takes a Holiday. Evening shadows drift across the estate of Duke Lambert, though there are no clouds to cause them. Darkly they invade the great hall of the castle, where a shrouded figure in their midst disturbs the midnight ruminations of the duke. The visitor is Death, come to arrange a three-day holiday for himself in the guise of a human being. The trembling noble can scarcely refuse to be a secretive host, and so it happens that Death appears among the other ducal guests as His Serene Highness, Prince Sirki of Vitalba Alexandri.