Theatrical check list

George Jean Nathan

LABURNUM GROVE (J. B. Priestley)—Priestley's invention sags in the middle section of this comedy of a supposedly respectable suburbanite who suddenly confounds his family by confessing that he is a counterfeiter, but his writing is so smooth and his humor often so lively that it isn't hard to forgive him his dramatic lapses. Edmund Gwenn periodically vaudevillizes the leading role, doubtless in the belief that Americans can't take straight comedy acting, but a histrio named Melville Cooper is the top in a secondary role. (Booth)

ESCAPE ME NEVER(Margaret Kennedy)—The Austrian born Elisabeth Bergner, the foremost German actress in everybody's estimation but Hitler's, worthy of your attention despite the fact that her present vehicle, a machine-made job, is in turn unworthy of hers. Let us hope that the Theatre Guild will see fit to give American audiences a view of her as Juliet. (Shubert)

FLY AWAY HOME(Dorothy Bennett and Irving White)—If some intermittent laughs can console you for generally slipshod and routine playwriting, you may possibly find some mild relish in this comedy about a group of sexually emancipated youngsters and their dumbfounded father. (48th St.)

CREEPING FIRE(Marie Baumer)—The species of melodrama that one encounters on the lesser movie screens. About as trashy as they come. (Vanderbilt)

POINT VALAINE(Noel Coward)—Admirers of Mr. Coward's dramatic art will have some tall explaining to do about this one. A melodramatic tale of whopping sexual jinks on an island in the Indies, it avoids an air of travesty only by virtue of uncommonly adroit acting and staging. The company, which is headed by Lynn Fontanne, Alfred Lunt, Osgood Perkins and Louis Hayward, performs its difficult task with a high competence, but the manuscript makes comical faces at the performers, despite their best and gravest efforts. (Barrymore)

ACCENT ON YOUTH(Samson Raphaelson)—A pleasantly humorous, if somewhat overwritten, version of the familiar stage tale of the elderly hero who wins the beautiful ingenue from the juvenile. Particularly gratifying to gentlemen past sixty who are still rarin' to go. (Plymouth)

THE OLD MAID (Zoe Akins)— A dramatization of an Edith Wharton story that is emotionally and thematically dated in the present-day theatre. It belongs to the period just after roller drop-curtains. Considerable taste has been displayed in its settings and costumes. (Empire)