EARLY ENGLISH FOLK COMEDY TO BE PRESENTED NEXT FALL

The first American production of the very earliest of the English folk comedies. "Gammer Gurton's Needle," is to be presented next fall by Stuart Walker, creater of the Portmanteau Theatre. That Mr. Walker contemplates several performances of this rollicking, jovial, and wholly delightful comedy, brought back from that almost forgotten time of Christ's College, Cambridge (1575), during the coming Portmanteau tour is a matter for congratulation and there will be many who will wish to see it, partly for the memories it will revive and partly for the opportunity to see just what sort of an evening's entertainment "Gammer" will provide--she who lost her needle and made us laugh in spite of ourselves even while we were studying her quaint English and her charming verse text.

At a recent performance of "Gammer Gurton's Needle," presented by the Portmanteau Theatre company before the faculty and student body of Amherst College, a woman was heard to explain to her companion that "Stuart Walker wrote one of these plays and Clyde Fitch wrote 'Gammer Gurton's Needle.'" The fact that Clyde Fitch was not born until some two hundred years after the writing of the comedy did not seem to count. But the conversation brings to light several interesting facts about the actual authorship of the play, generally attributed to John Still, Bishop of Bath and Wells, and formerly resident master of arts at Christ's College. However, there is no conclusive evidence of John Still's authorship, and the farce, "made by Mr. S., master of arts," as explained in some of the prints, could easily have been by Mr. William Stevenson or any other contemporary writer of the time, provided of course that he had an exceptionally keen sense of the ridiculous. The comedy is intensely humorous, and while few would take up the mere loss of a needle as the basis for a five-act comedy, such a loss in 1575 was far from being a trifle. At the time the play was written a steel needle was treasured as few family possessions are today, and when Gammer Gurton lost hers--the only one she possessed--the misfortune took on the importance of a family calamity. How it went and where it went and the disaster that accompanied its going and the search for it, affords a riotous comedy that keeps the audience in a constant state of excitement and good humor.

"Gammer Gurton's Needle" will be but one of the many interesting plays to be given by the Portmanteau Theatre company during the fall and winter season, when the theatre--a movable, portable playhouse--will be shown in the majority of the principal cities from coast to coast. In addition to a number of plays by Mr. Walker himself, there will be shown several by Lord Dusany, whose "Night at an Inn" is now the biggest one-act sensation that the New York stage has had for many years. Mr. Walker has secured the exclusive American rights to Dusany's "The Golden Doom," and this play will be an important part of the repertoire. Other interesting plays will be Shakspere's "Love's Labor's Lost," Oscar Wilde's "The Birthday of the Infanta"; "The Golden Ball," by Alice Brown; "Six Games," by Anna Hempstead Branch; and new plays by Hortense Flexner, Grace M. Lewis, Eleanor Langdon Leeds and Gordon Bottomley. Strindberg's "Swanwhite" also will be given.