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Elmer the Great. Elmer Kane didn't quite know what it was all about but that was something which he refused to admit to himself or anyone else. His girl didn't seem to think he was so hot; all Elmer knew how to do well was to pitch ball, so he took the contract that was offered to him and went south to training camp with the "New Yorks." His teammates kidded him because they thought he was fresh; Elmer, puzzled and proud, started to leave the club. But the boys knew that Elmer wanted to make a speech over the radio so they handed him an electric heater and told him to go ahead and to say something nice to Coolidge who was listening in. That made it all right with Elmer.
During the course of the season, he won 27 and lost three. After the world series he clicked with his girl and took in about $100,000 worth of contracts for endorsements and got a $30,000 contract with the "New Yorks" and took to eating the kind of breakfasts he really liked, nine-course breakfasts. Still, he didn't quite know what it was all about.
That is the story of Elmer Kane in its essentials; it is also the story of Jack Keefe, the hero of Ring Lardner's You Know Me, Al. Somehow Ring Lardner has been able to put Jack Keefe, himself in person, onto the stage, and Walter Huston plays the part so that you forget it is one. George M. Cohan produced the play and Cohan plays have plots; therefore you will find, muffling the funny and pathetic character of "Hurry" Kane, a ridiculous jumble about an attempted Black Sox deal which is very nearly sufficient to spoil the play entirely.
The War Song. Theatre-goers well know that the post-War reconstruction period has not ended though a decade's years have intervened since Nov. 11, 1918. Critics & others, sated with many a propagandrama for or against hostilities, frequently have wished for a pact to outlaw war as an instrument of national amusement policy. But let no critic ban war or dressmaking or boxing or any other subject as a playground if playsmiths can use war, dressmaking or boxing to a worthy end, as in this piece.
The first scene is in the Manhattan home of the Rosens in September, 1917. Eddie Rosen (George Jessel) does not want to go to war because he does not want the burden of supporting his mother (Clara Langsner) to fall to his sister (Shirley Booth). He is drafted, sent to France. In a Y. M. C. A. hut he meets his onetime sweetheart (Lola Lane), learns she has married Eddie's onetime pal and fellow song-plugger (Raymond Guion), both of whom are singing and dancing for the delectation of the troops. From that point the story fizzles into a sequence of capture by the Germans when Eddie meets in a shell-hole an officer who had seduced his sister. Behind the German lines Eddie learns from the officer that his mother has died and the piece ends with Eddie lachrymosely chanting the Kaddish, Jewish prayer for the dead.
That is what may seem a terrible play, sight unseen, but each role has been given to a thorough player. The sets by Yellenti include one of a scene in No Man's Land which must give an authentic impression of that hell to one who has never been there. Upon the square shoulders of George Jessel has been placed the task of carrying off the play's heavier moments—a task to which he is more than equal.