To Be Continued

In his new comedy, To Be Continued, William Marchant has treated the moral structure of Western society in about as casual a manner as anybody in a pretty casual century. Without batting an eyelash he sets the scene in the Greenwich Village pied-a-terre of a New York jeweler, weaves the action from the point of view of that gentleman's mistress, and as I understand it, blandly assumes throughout that there is no problem of social morality in the relationship.

This assumption would be defensible or the comedy were played merely for the laughs inherent in the reversal of the accepted view of marriage. Marchant does make the most of his Boccaccian situation, even dragging in somebody else's mistress to add to the incongruity. Unfortunately, however, after he has more than exhausted the possibilities in this direction he begins to moralize abstractly on the role of the husband in the home, the wife in the home, the mistress in the home, and the "delicate balance" of human relationships.

Briefly the plot has to do with the machinations of the mistress (Dorothy Stickney) and her cohort (Lulla Gear) in trying to get the husband (Neil Hamilton) to divorce the wife (Jean Dixon). Since the management takes great pains to shroud the denouncement in secrecy, I would't give it away; suffice it to say that it is unrealistic and unsatisfying. The acting was on the whole good, particularly that of Miss Stickney and Mr. Hamilton, until the last act when no one quite seemed to know what the author had in mind. Donald Oenslager's one set was admirable as was the staging by Guthrie McClintic.