BIGGERS'S NEW PLAY SCORED

"The Harvard playwrights -- their name is legion!" So remarked a New York manager a New days ago on being told of the production of "If You're Only Human" at the Plymouth Theatre, Boston; well might he have added, had he been endowed with the gift of prophecy, that this offering of the newest of our writers for the stage would rank with the best of the Cambridge dramatic output.

Mr. Biggers's play is a comedy, but there is in it more than a little of the poignant, the near-tragic, Marie Gilmore, a leading lady, is in love with Billy Kinsman, the butterfly son of a self-made millionaire who of late has been "doing society" with his pompous wife. It becomes the duty of the actress to show this family their foibles, to tear the masks from their faces, to discover them unto themselves as genuinely human beings. This task takes her through the better part of four acts, sees her at one point a comedy character, at another serious. The part of Marie is the pivotal part of the play, varied and exacting. Our stage today holds, I think, but one actress capable of justly interpreting the character and that is Miss Rose Stahl. As played yesterday, Marie was little more than a speaker of words. Any other than a good play must have failed through such gross misinterpretation--or rather non-interpretation of its principal role.

The production in general was careless and inadequate, yet the play "scored." There were nine curtain calls after the third act, seven after the fourth: this the sincerer compliment to Mr. Biggers. The action needs quickening in a few places and the dialogue, compression; on the whole both would be creditable work at the hands of a playwright of long experience. There is, throughout, the "Biggers touch" which we have come to know in many delightful stories, deft character drawing, a humor that is original, refreshingly American.

AVE, Mr. Biggers!