New Drama

HERE are two contemporary plays by comparatively young and successful dramatists. Mr. Sherwood has followed the earlier success of "The Road to Rome" with "Waterloo Bridge", which has had a long and profitable run this past winter in New York. Mr. Howard is known best as the author of "The Silver Cord", and of "Ned McCobb's Daughter", one of the Theatre Guild successes. "Half Gods," his last play, had a brief life on an unsympathetic Broadway.

It does not seem unfair to take the works of these two writers as indicative of the state of the drama in this land of the free and home of the brave. Some will point, of course, to Eugene O'Neill as undisputably superior to either of the gentlement here considered, but then, I can point to others (we'll not bother to name them) who are vastly inferior to Messrs Sherwood and Howard. In short, I submit that these two playwrights may be expected to display the faults and merits (if any) characteristic of the writing that is being done for the stage today.

Take first, for example, Mr. Sherwood's "Waterloo Bridge". It is a story about an American streetwalker stranded, pending certain Continental hostilities, in London, and a nice doughboy on leave from the Front. The play is obviously contemporary, because it is about War and a tart. Of course, just as our modern stage ladies always turn out in the course of the play to be tarts, so this tart in the last act becomes a lady. (You must pardon the over-use of the word "tart" in this review, but modern literature has made "lady" or even "woman" seem so Victorian).

The play makes pretty good reading, but there is absolutely nothing distinguished about it from the first scene to the final curtain. The lines and mechanical construction of the play show familiarity with what can and what cannot be produced, but the lines are by no means uniformly and consistently good.

Less prententions even than "Waterloo Bridge", is Mr. Howard's "Half Goda". It is a trite and trivial discussion of modern marriage and divorce. A wife is psychoanalyzed, goes p-fff-t (as Mr. W. Winchell says) with her husband, and opens the way for a lot of deserved, but absolutely unoriginal lambasting of the so-called Science of Psychology. Of course, in the end, they all go old-fashioned, and rejoin for the sake of the kiddies. It is perhaps a bit shameful of a reviewer to criticize a play which was written for one purpose--to stay on Broadway--but on the other hand, as soon as the play is published in book form, higher standards than those of financial success on the Great White Way should be applied.