"I'm glad I don't like oysters," said the famous young lady, "because, if I did, I'd eat 'em and I hate 'em." The Copley Players' latest offering, entitled "The Oyster" as the subway billboards inform all and sundry, leaves one in the same frame of mind. Here are hundreds of people in the audience whooping away for dear life at a certain play that leaves this reviewer cold; the awful possibility that he might see a certain amount of humor in it and so be tempted to see other plays of the same kind has given him no peace since. It is at once depressing and injurious to the ears to sit in the middle of an audience that progresses rapidly into hysteries without any desire to laugh oneself.

A simple and retiring soul who feels the lusts of the flesh coming over him is the central character. The title has no lack of support: at least seven times in the first act he is told that, you know, he is exactly like an oyster, and he speculates in an ingenious diversion of ways as to what happens to the oyster when it leaves its bed. He gets mixed up in his chum's love affairs, attempts suicide because he has been called a traitor and traitors should be shot, and variously displays the pellucid simplicity of his nature, like the dear old boy he is. Norman Fanchild plays the Oyster; and he does things to an impossible role. The comedy of the piece is so broad that no mortal could look across it; he alone of the company plays it in the manner of a vaudevile farce as it should be played.

Miss Standing is blessed with the role of a vivacious young thing who plays around the stage with all kinds of nods, becks, and wreathed smiles; and when Miss Standing is called upon to frolic, her admirers must either stay away or keep looking steadfastly elsewhere. Mr. Mowbray and Miss Dudgeon and Miss Ediss also ran: the sogginess of the track was too much for everybody.

That is the point of the whole thing. Any playwright who must get his laughs from a revolver explosion, a smear of lipstick on the temple, and a fall on a couch that looks like a juggler getting ready to spin a barrel on his feet is no safe playmate for even the best stockcompany. It is to be supposed that at least two happy couples were united before the play closed: thereof the chronicler telleth not. In fact, he is thinking of writing a book called "Third Acts, by one who has never been there."