THE CRIMSON PLAYGOER

Add Grant Mitchell to the long list of things which you either like or don't. And if you like Grant you will like "One of the Family," the current attraction at the Wilbur., for this latest play of his is like all the others that we have ever seen him in. He is as good--or as bad--as ever; the comedy is likewise as good or etc.; and the supporting cast performs in much the same way that Grant Mitchell's casts usually do.

"One of the Family" is a comedy, a straightforward he-man affair, with no subtlety, no Arlenesque sophistication. The players all say what they mean, and they inflect their voices in such a manner that there can be no possible doubt about the words meaning just what they do in the dictionary. And the acting is much of the same variety. Every motion that is made says to the audience "Let me explain" and there is never a good line spoken but what the whole cast violently signals to the audience "Get ready to laugh. One-two-threee."

But it must be admitted that there are plenty of laughs in the play, nor is their enjoyment decreased by the fact that nothing more than one's bodily presence at the theatre is required.

The setting of the play perhaps aids in the good-natured enjoyment of the three acts. The scene is laid in Boston, and the characters are billed as typical of the city. Harvard is mentioned frequently, and always with conventional accent--conventional at least in New Haven' and Worcester. Indeed, Henry Adams himself went to the University by compromise: He picked Yale, the Adams family chose Harvard; and they compromised.

Briefly told, the plot deals with the life of the Adams family, THE Adamses you know, and what happened when Henry Adams, meek, generous, and above all, conventional, eloped with a stenographer during his summer vacation.

No less than six Adamses are listed on the program, and before the final curtain falls, another one has been added. All of them cover their roles adequately. For real realism, however, they are not in a class with two minor characters. One of these, Maggie, played by Beulah Bondi, in the role of the servant who has been with the family so long that she has become, not a servant, but a retainer, fairly runs away with the show. The other, Frank Owens, nee Fleming Ward, adds the other true touch by playing the victim in the fight scene an inevitable scene in Grant Mitchell's procrustean and as such reappearing on the stage to explain how it all happened, at the same time spraying the footlights with loosened teeth.