The Theatre in Boston

"He Said--and She Believed Him" is a long, complicated name for a short and rather familiar type of play. We can all remember "Stop Thief," "Officer 666" and others which do not contain policemen. "He Said, etc." contains all the same ingredients of these old familiar farces, including the policeman. When this officer is asked whether he is or is not primitive, he replies that he is Irish. You expected as much. The play is full of the kind of clever lines that the gentle reader could easily have made up himself.

The true innovation of the play is the manner in which a young physician makes several other men's wives fall in love with him. The method used in each case is humorously uniform, but it is clever enough to give him a tremendous practice for a time. What happens when these methods are revealed is the cause of all the trouble.

The denouement comes after a Professor Garrison acts upon his theory that if his wife loves another, he must let her go to this man because her lover is her true husband "in the eyes of thinking people." The number of such thinking people is fortunately small, and by the unromantic and the unmarried Jane Mason, the situation is saved and the doctor's harem returns to its or their husbands.

Mrs. Craig is eternally young in the part of the Professor's wife. She has all the skill of long experience and much of the bloom of youth. Frederick Eric does well as the theorist, reminding Cambridge auditors of many friends of the lecture platform. In the part of Dr. May, Harvey Hawley is consistently clever and nimble.

Josephine Drake as the practical Jane has good lines and looks well in a purple hat. Kate Ryan and Thomas Tracy handle their Irish character parts with spirit and not altogether unnatural brogue.

The play is an unmusical comedy of the well-known wide open type, with people tearing about the stage uttering broad jokes in loud Broadway voices. It has no value, but, if you must laugh, go and see "He Said--And She Believed Him."