Word: behrman
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...been said that Greenwich Village during the twenties was filled with young men writing novels about young men writing novels. S. N. Behrman, in his latest play, "No Time For Comedy", has gone the young men of Greenwich Village one better. He is a young man, or at least a middle-aged man, who has written a play about a young man writing a play about the wife of a young man writing a play. The total effect, leading up to a grand climax in the last act, leaves the audience a bit at sea about what playwright is writing...
...show at the Wilbur does not really seem to be a play at all, but merely the discussion of the possibilities of plays. It is an illuminating and entertaining discussion, to be sure, but it gives the impression that Mr. Behrman is spending three acts rolling up his sleeves and sharpening his pencils without ever really getting down to work. He has spent three acts in eloquent defense of comedy and yet has only succeeded in writing a comedy which is self-conscious, superficially novel without being actually original...
...Time For Comedy (by S. N. Behrman; produced by Katharine Cornell and the Playwrights Co.) brought Katharine Cornell triumphantly back to Broadway after a two years' absence-in the first full comedy role of her career...
...Time For Comedy Behrman (perhaps transferring his own qualms) treats of a writer of comedies who wonders whether he shouldn't be more serious-minded. This beautiful notion is implanted in him by an uplifted, though agreeably carnal, society woman, and involves him in a mess of ideas about immortality and Loyalist Spain. It takes all the skill of the playwright's clever, patient wife (Katharine Cornell) to give his plays, and her life, a happy ending...
Less formidable dramatists than Behrman have had a go at this plot, but much of the time Behrman handles it with adroitness and wit. The trouble is that Behrman, a Frederick Lonsdale who reads The New Republic, too often makes sex a mere come-on for ideas, none of which he accepts. He is a kind of ideological window-shopper; or, like Pooh-Bah, a Leader of the Opposition, he feels he must resist what he approves of as First Lord of the Treasury...