Subway Express. If a police inspector be summoned aboard a subway train and told that a man has been shot dead, it may well give him pause. If a medical examiner gets on a few stations down the line and declares that the killing resulted not from shooting but from electrocution a few moments beforehand, the inspector may well be dumbfounded. If the car lights are suddenly extinguished and a likely witness is riddled with bullets, the inspector may even be pardoned for surrendering his badge.
Inspector Hannen (Edward Ellis) faced all these dilemmas, together with a car full of yelping women, emotional Italians, contradictory evidence. He kept everyone there, including the corpse of Stock-broker Edward Tracy (Jack Lee), which sat upright in grisly electrified rigidity and a Panama hat throughout most of the play. Inspector Hannen questioned the late Mr. Tracy's lovely wife (Dorothy Peterson) and his partner (Edward Pawley), who was also Mrs. Tracy's lover. After the dark murder of a clerk (J. Hammond Dailey) in the firm of the deceased, the Inspector ordered the motorman to retrace his course. Then he discovered how it was possible for a man to be electrocuted in a subway car designed to insulate its passengers from any possible contact with the third rail.
The solution is ingenious, will appeal to those who like a blend of mystery and mechanics. The technically expert setting shows the interior of one of Manhattan's Interborough Rapid Transit cars which whizzes past lights and stations. Co-Playwrights Eva Kay Flint and Martha Madison have contrived an exciting addition to the season's many slaughters.
Many Waters. It is a favorite axiom of dramatists that you never can tell what anguish has moulded the calm faces on the avenues. Monckton Hoffe, a British playwright, has for some time been demonstrating this fact in London with Many Waters, which permits you to live through the years with a little architect, James Barcaldine, and his pleasant wife. So tranquil are the Barcaldines that a theatrical impresario cites them as the sort of people who like twinkling artificial entertainment because their own lives are so fatuously real.
The Barcaldine history is then exposed in a series of flashbacks—an accidental meeting at an exposition in the century's early years, a wedding in a registry office with two charwomen as witnesses. Years later their only daughter gives herself to a married man who lives in the flat below and dies in childbirth. Barcaldine faces a bankruptcy court. But always there are subtle filaments which bind man and wife —"Many waters cannot quench love, neither can the floods drown it."
This sentiment seldom cloys because Ernest Truex gives the most serious, tender performance of his career and Marda Vanne as the wife never forgets restraint. Certain episodes exhibit flagrancies of aste. But when the daughter (Maisie Darrel) confesses her troubles to a stalwart boy who wants her love (Robert Douglas), the scene trembles with tragedy and gallantry. And a parody of court procedure is introduced which provides peerless comic relief.