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In Swing Your Lady, the authors of Sailor, Beware! have gone about as far inland as they possibly could-to Joplin, Mo.—for a locale. When Joe Skopapoulos is instructed to put out his tongue for medical inspection, it is also necessary to instruct him to retract it when the examination is over. His entourage can converse without letting him understand what they say by spelling crucial words. When they want him to be amused, they invite him to "sit down and read the pictures." Broke and stranded, Joe's manager signs him to wrestle Sadie. Joe. who likes women close to his own weight, falls in love with her, enjoys her favors, refuses to go through with the match.
The problem of finding someone to pit against Joe is solved when Noah, the gigantic, bearded father of one of Sadie's three informal children, takes umbrage at the usurper, comes down the mountain with his fowling piece. After a careful rehearsal of grunts, groans, screams and floor-poundings, the two are shown wrestling in the arena. Pep talk before the bout: "Never forget, boys, that a good wrestler is always a good performer."
Iron Men (by Francis Gallagher; Norman Bel Geddes, producer) presents a scene never before approximated for verisimilitude in the theatre-the uppermost steel skeleton of a skyscraper under construction. Not content with that, Designer-Producer Bel Geddes has put his scene into operation. A giant crane looming up into the flies brings up six or seven big I-beams which are bolted into place before the eyes of the audience. In robust defiance of the "pusher" (man with the blueprints), four steelworkers ride on the ball attached to the crane-hook. Only flaws in this extraordinary feat of artistic naturalism are that when the beams (actually wood) strike something they emit a hollow thump instead of a ringing clank, and that when the inevitable victim falls from the crane to his death, a ludicrous dummy is seen tumbling against the backdrop.
A generation ago David Belasco initiated a phase of naturalism on the U. S. stage with real flowers, water faucets from which water ran, coffee that steamed and smelled. Of late, the Krasnaya Presnaya Theatre in Moscow, part of whose repertory is a play in which the audience finds itself in the midst of a pitched battle, has taken the lead in holding the theatrical mirror up to life. From whatever source Mr. Bel Geddes gets his inspiration for such supernaturalistic productions as he designed for Dead End and Iron Men, he has not been over-lucky in finding good plays to go with them.