Word: plays
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...play to make first-night audiences shrive themselves for past sins is American Landscape. Four years of sulking in his tent have robbed the Rice who wrote The Adding Machine, Street Scene, Counsellor-at-Law of all his old cunning, power, punch. American Landscape tells of the head of an old Connecticut family (Charles Waldron), a benevolent paternalist out to sell his factory because it has been unionized. To make a clean sweep, he decides to sell his farm as well. But when he agrees to sell it to a Nazi Bund for a "recreation ground," not only his family...
Like Abe Lincoln in Illinois, American Landscape sounds the trumpet for free dom, tolerance and democracy. A timely and impressive theme, Mr. Rice has hag ridden it into a loud and loquacious ser mon. In its few good moments the play rises to ringing eloquence, but far oftener sinks to stagy gestures and sentimental shenanigans...
...real drama propels Rice's story. Only flag-draped speeches and Fourth-of-July sentiments drift across the stage. Ghosts do the work, all too picturesquely, that cries out for living men. At its worst, the play is mere drivel. When the final curtain comes down on the family drinking a toast, it seems like the conclusion of a homemade English boarding-school playlet. When Moll Flanders (Isobel Elsom) rustles archly across the stage in her duchessy silks, mouthing fancy, ye-old-tea-shoppe truisms, she brings to mind Penrod and his friends acting out Mrs. Lora Rewbush...
...only brash, Johnny-jump-up William Saroyan hastens more incontinently to answer his critics than Playwright Clifford Odets. Last week, after the opening of his new play about love, Rocket to the Moon, Odets punctually tore into print...
...mural system has been recognized, it should be possible to go the whole hog and give them a center--(a bulletin board in the Athletic Building would suffice)--manager, and permission to participate in other House sports. And governed by the existing rules, which forbid men on probation to play on winning House teams against Yale, there would not exist the disparity of strength manifested in the case of the P.B.H. group, since the so-called "Ramblers" used men kept off the varsities by bad marks. Thus, for the abortive attempt of Claverly to obtain lasting status, the H.A.A. ought...