MENORAH SOCIETIES TO PRESENT THREE PLAYS

The following prereview of the three one-act plays to be given tonight at Agassiz Theatre by the Harvard and Radcliffe Menorah Societies was written by a member of the English Department.

The three plays to be given to night in the Agassiz theatre by the Harvard and Radcliffe Menorah Societies, "Matches", "An Idyll of the Shops", and "Hunger", are varied in content; and all are in one way or another interesting. The first, by Liebovitz, has a profoundly human theme, the helpless idealism of an older generation confronting the callow indifference of the younger, a father pleading for loyalties which mean nothing to his children. The conflict is an old one, but it acquires from its Jewish setting a certain concentration as well as dignity and pathos, the rift between father and sons being so easily enhanced by differences of education, speech, and dress. The old man is an admirable mixture of hard good sense and other worldliness; his imagination is alive with the symbols of his religion and race, and he speaks tenderly of early surroundings, of privation and piety and study, of a world which, one is led to feel with him, was a real school of character.

Very real and moving is "An Idyll of the Shops" by Ben Hooht and Kenneth Sawyer Good win, It would be difficult to find a better one act play of its kind a better picture of the grim conditions of modern industry frustrating human life at every turn, of health happiness and love succumbing to start necessity. Fom first to last the play is naturally and convincingly acted. The lovers by Miss Dorothy Waterman and Mr. Robert Cushing the workman who was once so gay and now returns to beg for his old job, still trying pathetically to keep up his price, by Laurence Rittenband.

Again Mr. Abramson is notably good as the beggar in "Hunger", and the performance as a whole is smooth and even Mr. Huberman as the poet looks his part, and makes it sufficiently wistful, and Miss Fay Goeil plays the Girl with taste and conviction. The play, written some years ago for the English 47 Workshop, is by Eugene Fillot. Its moral is perhaps a little obvious, but it does succeed in fixing one's attention and curiosity upon the revelation awaited from the lips of the Satisfied One.