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Two Hundred Were Chosen (by E.P. Conkle; Sidney Harmon and the Actors Repertory Company, producers) is a play about the colony of bankrupt Midwest farmers who with great fanfare were sent by the New Deal last year to get a new start in Southern Alaska's Matanuska Valley (TIME, May 6, 1935 et seq.). On a set devised by Donald Oenslager which has a huge, improbable limb of some coniferous tree hanging from the proscenium, hopeful men, women & children arrive singing, yapping, gossiping, making acquaintances. Because a bullying, stupid army man named Hodges makes a blunder, the colonists put in three weeks' labor building their cabins the wrong way, are ordered to tear them down and rebuild according to specifications. Ill-humor reaches a peak with a shortage of fruit, vegetables and salt; a raid on the commissary is nipped by Hodges who has turned one colonist into a spying stoolpigeon.
Straight out of James Oliver Curwood is the character of the sturdy civilian overseer who sympathizes with the newcomers but scorns them as failures, thinks them something of a blight on the rugged country he loves. Inspired by a blonde who acts like an amalgam of Joan of Arc and a visiting sociologist, the men "come to their senses" when their children fall sick by the dozen. They put up a hospital in 24 hours (offstage). The overseer changes his mind about having them sent back, sits down to talk over development plans. Near the final curtain, inevitably, a colonist rushes onstage to announce the first birth.
The cracks in Two Hundred Were Chosen are literally calked with cinematic hokum and bucolic humor of the "Hold 'er, Newt, she's a-r'arin' " school, but beneath all this there is plainly discernible a sincere and imaginative view of an unusual social experiment. A woman fed up with the childish bickering of the males shouts the play's most astringent line: "There aren't any men up here—only farmers."