(5 of 5)
Her present drama is a case in point. She is called upon to portray a shrewd and tolerant Park Avenue matron who has to adjust the difficulties of her grey-haired, licentious husband, her fickle and amorous daughter, and her stripling son who has married a dancer. When one of her husband's mistresses declares that he is a man of surprises, Mrs. Fiske replies: "Don't tell me anything I shouldn't know." It would be well if the play preserved this cheery attitude, if it contained more such agreeable detail as a burlesque on a reporter from the cultivated New York Times, who enters tail-coated and gracious, sniffs a glass of chartreuse and announces: "What an exquisite bouquet!'' But the playwrights forego all this jollity to deal with the repellent fact that the son's cabaret bride had once had transactions with his father. Unless it were treated with tragic nobility this theme would inevitably be odoriferous. Occurring in the midst of farce it is doubly rank. Why Mrs. Fiske is willing to submit to such indignities she alone can tell.
Hatcher Hughes and Alan Williams wrote the play. Mr. Hughes's talents would seem to have deteriorated since his Pulitzer-prizewinning Hell-Bent jer Heaven (1923). Further conceptions of this sort he might well keep in the cloistral isolation of Columbia University, where he lectures on the Drama.
Ritzy will provide excellent fun for all convention delegates spending an evening at the theatre and for all ladies' theatre parties in which no one is going to write a paper. A young $10,000-a-year married couple have scarcely risen from their daybed when they are notified that they have inherited $200,000. Appalling expenditure is the order of the day until evening, when they find that the will has been justly contested. Ernest Truex is chief farceur.