The Lake (by Dorothy Massingham and Murray MacDonald; produced by Jed Harris). In this sincere, intelligent but somewhat rambling play, there are two powerful scenes. One occurs when Stella Surrege (Katharine Hepburn), who has broken off a sticky love affair with a horsey neighbor (Geoffrey Wardwell) to marry a kindly, understanding War veteran with £15,000 a year, discovers that she loves her new husband John Clayne . (Colin Clive). It is an hour after their wedding, on a rainy September afternoon. Stella and John are standing under a leaky marquee. Laughing together, they get into their car to go away. The car skids into a lake which fussy old Mrs. Surrege (Frances Starr) has had built beyond the garden. John Clayne is fished out of the lake dead.
The other moving scene comes four days later, when Stella, dazed by her grief, starts out of the Surrege's drawing room toward the lake to do what she thinks is the only thing left for her to do. Her wise compassionate aunt (Blanche Bates) stops her at the door. They have a conversation from which Stella derives comfort, if not consolation. As the play ends, Stella is again going through the door toward the lake.*
Before The Lake opened in Manhattan last week, with the most expensive premiere of the season, its audience had been led to expect the season's most exciting play. Producer Jed Harris, active on Broadway again after two years of noisily doing nothing, had assembled a good cast, fine sets by Jo Mielziner. For his lead, he had Katharine Hepburn who had left Broadway two years ago after a modest success in The Warrior's Husband. During that interval, with four cinema roles, she had made herself the most talked-about actress in the U. S. Too young and too shy, in the presence of an audience, to seem as commanding a personality on the stage as on the screen, she gave a talented, clever performance marred only by a trick of keying her voice to a high, flat monotone to indicate emotional intensity.
Daughter of a well-to-do Hartford physician, Katharine Hepburn was a member of the Class of 1929 at Bryn Mawr, prefaced her one important Broadway performance in The Warrior's Husband with four small parts and several unproductive engagements as understudy. Since becoming a celebrity, she has fiercely fought to distinguish between her private and her professional life. Of her education, she says: "I never went to Bryn Mawr—that was another Katharine Hepburn." Of her husband. Insurance Broker Ludlow Ogden Smith, whom she married Dec. 12, 1928 and with whom she lives in Manhattan at No. 244 East 49th St.,† she says to interviewers: "I am not married and never was." In Hollywood, Katharine Hepburn lives on a chicken farm with her friend Laura Harding, goes to no parties, calls herself an exhibitionist because she likes to wear overalls to work. When she returns to cinema, she will perform first as Queen Elizabeth, later as Joan of Arc.