CRABS HAVE FIELD DAY IN CRAVEN'S COMEDY

The purpose of the Business School has been found. It is to train men to be complete crabs. Business is not a profession or even a fine art. Business, as well as the family organization, is solely to provide opportunities for being disagreeable. Those opportunities are multiplied if there is in the family a young man, fresh from college, who knows all about business and everything else. The only way for a father and son to understand each other is for them both to realize that not honesty, but ill humor, is the best policy.

Frank Craven in "New Brooms", opening this week at the New Park Theatre, has written a very good comedy. The star of "The First Year" in his new play shows what happens when a grouchy old father hands over the reins of his business for one year to his son, whose ambition is to make himself agreeable to everybody including oil stock salesmen, union laborers, and domestic servants.

Role Cut to Mr. Craven's Pattern

In a curtain speech Monday night, Mr. Craven said that he had returned from his scheduled retirement to play the part of the young son, because of the sickness of the actor assigned to the part, and the lack of a capable understudy. But the role he has created in Mr. Thomas Watson Jr. could only suffer in the hands of some other player. The part of the grouchy old father is played in the manner of the best crabs by Mr. Robert McWade. Miss Blyth Daly, as Geraldine Marsh, the orphaned friend of the family turned housekeeper, entirely satisfactory as the Pollyanna minority, and shows a distinct appreciation of the part. Mr. Albert G. Andrews, as the Ray, Philip Dow, makes an ass of the person in the most approved fashion.

Mr. Craven is very much pleased with himself for the way he has shown up the "father and son" activities of the Y. M. C. A. and the Rotary Clubs. He is so delighted that once in a while he gloats over it in a long speech. But the clever gag that is almost sure to come is worth waiting for.