PETTICOAT FEVER

By Mark Reed '12 New York: Samuel French. 1935. '

Petticoat Fever has to its credit a long run on the New York stage, and was one of the plays most often chosen for production in summer theatres this season. It has therefore reached a large audience already, and it deserves whatever widening of audience may come by its appearance in book form. It is nearly as much fun to read as to see.

It is a farce in which a young English- man, isolated as wireless operator on the Labrador coast, finds love at last. A pompous politician-aviator is wrecked there with his fiancee, who is ravishingly beautiful. So the young man prevents their escape, gains time to make love to the girl, is almost defeated by the appearance of a former fiancee of his own, but wins in the end. The fever which his isolation has not unnaturally induced makes his wooing distinctly vigorous, but also funny.

The complications are incredible enough if soberly examined—the wireless station, for instance, seems at once accessible and inaccessible—but Mr. Reed's play moves so fast and smoothly that the incredibilities are quite completely covered. It exhibits a high skill not only in suspending disbelief but also in transmitting from the page to the imaginative mind the look and sound of the text on stage. It is distinctly an actor's play, made 100% for farce-players, but only a little of the business is on the stock farce level. There is a lot of popping in and out of doors, of course; there is a trifle of stumbling over furniture; there is a of the usual drunk scene. But most of the time the actors are really playing freshly, having really bright things to say and do. The play rightfully wins the success it has had and will have.