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What dramatic force there is to the play is heightened by the work of Joseph Buloff, who alone of the cast seemed to get completely inside his assigned characterization. The sardonic comedy of Evelyn Varden, as mistress of the villa, helps, but Author Hecht failed to pencil in much of a part for Sylvia Sidney, six years absent from the Manhattan stage, with the result that the whole counterplot love story seems a device to accent the general indecisiveness of Hero Sterns.
A few Hechtisms, all of which sound better in the acoustics of a theatre: "We [the intellectuals] are always on the right side of discussions, but never on any side of the barricades"; "There's only one thing that's definitely known about God; He's on the side of the winner"; "If you get tired of the Fascist salute, the Bronx cheer is always waiting for you"; "Old love is garrulous . . . like a demented Cook's guide, swooning in front of all the landmarks and monuments"; "I'm a pathetic figure, an old best seller."
Product of Chicago's school of fireball journalism, Author Hecht covered Latin uprisings, in Berlin followed the Spartacists' uprising against the Ebert Government, ran the Chicago Literary Times, a bohemian and radical sheet. He and Charles MacArthur, another Chicago newspaper bravo, wrote The Front Page in 1928 and thereby hit professional pay dirt. During a fling with MacArthur in film production, a venture that improved their backgammon game but not their bank accounts, the pair found time to write the book for Billy Rose's Jumbo. Hecht confessed once that the drama was not a suitable medium for him ("I've never been able to compact an idea into three acts"). Last July he referred to Hollywood fame as "a load of clams" at which "a dreaming of his dithyrambs, our gallant Thespis thumbs his nose," few days later signed to write for Cinemogul Samuel Goldwyn at $260,000 annually, Hollywood's highest writing stipend. Soon thereafter he went on leave to try compacting two more ideas into three acts each. In the tortured and tortuous mental life of his hero Sterns in To Quito and Back, friends of Playwright Hecht thought they saw more than a trace of autobiography.
Susan and God (by Rachel Crothers; produced by John Golden). With the consummate stage artistry of Gertrude Lawrence brought whimsically to bear on the egregious Oxford Groupers (Buchmanites), Rachel Crothers and John Golden last week brightened up Broadway's hitherto lacklustre season with Susan and God.
Playwright Crothers pays most of her attention to Susan, a skittish matron who has barged in on drawing-room Buchmanism abroad, and has returned to bring this grand new message of the inspirational values of open confession straight from the horse mouth of one Lady Wiggam to her own circle of friends. In one week end of sustained busybodying, Susan manages, by artful innuendo and a few lucky potshots, to disrupt the placidly illicit love life of her hostess, turn a well adjusted May-December marriage into a triangular mess.