The Dark Tower (by Alexander Woollcott & George S. Kaufman; Sam H. Harris, producer). The mystery element of this frank but funny melodrama begins in a program note in which an actor billed as Anton Stengel is described as having been a member of Max Reinhardt's companies in both Berlin and Vienna who has been working in Hollywood and is just making his bow on the Broadway stage. Sly Polemist Woollcott (The New Yorker), who relishes a good mystification, must have enjoyed inserting that bit into the humorous murder show he has written with famed Collaborator Kaufman (Of Thee I Sing, et al.).
The play concerns an actress (Margalo Gillmore) who is revisited by her deplorable husband, Stanley Vance (Ernest Milton), a homosexual masochist and the most despicable villain who has set foot on the stage since Simon Legree. Returning from a long disappearance, Vance begins to exert his baleful influence over Miss Gillmore, a spell from which she had just recovered. He makes her tie his shoes, hustle for his breakfast, breaks her spirit. Both her brother (kinetic Basil Sydney) and her manager who loves her (William Harrigan) have good reason to kill Vance. But the job is finally done very adroitly in a room at the Waldorf by a mysterious German— a part credited to Mr. Stengel of the Reinhardt companies.
Best of three lively character parts with which the authors have enlivened the play is taken by little Porter Hall (The Warrior's Husband). Cast as a very domesticated New York detective, his manner while describing the routine horrors of a policeman's life is excruciatingly bland. "Well," he confesses to the actress's family, "we aren't much worried about this case. We don't care if one crook murders another crook— especially if they are out of town crooks." He does something for the actress her doctor could not do. He releases her from the obsessing fear that she has killed her husband herself while under his hypnotic influence, restores her self-confidence. In gratitude she promises to read the detective's daughter's play, send them both tickets to her new show.
"Where can I get hold of you?" she asks.
"Oh, police headquarters—it's in the phone book."
Mary of Scotland (by Maxwell Anderson; produced by the Theatre Guild). Nearly 400 years after her birth, any new play or book about Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots, is news in the hope that it may explain why Mary is still potent to make historians and poets weep. She was Queen of Scotland a few days after birth, Queen of France at 18, true Queen of England according to Catholic Europe. She was tall, slim, dark, with an oval, plump-cheeked face like Film Actress Diana Wynyard's. She had beauty, brains, charm that she never turned off. She had little Scots patriotism, no bigotry, a great gift for hatred and revenge, a warm and grateful heart. The Scots, intent on being Protestants, were suspicious of her. England's Elizabeth feared, hated and envied her. Mary was alone in a country too cold for her.