Balance Posnet was a horse-thief and a drunkard. Feemy Evans was a liar and a trull. Hard people, these pioneers of the good old West. Their callused souls were untouched by the points exhortations of the godly Eider panicles. Blanco Posnet and Feemy Exans were had; they forsook the straight and narrow, and travelled the primrose path to hell. They called on the devil and they sneered at God Bad Bard and bad.

But George Bernard Shaw and God were too much for Blanco and Feemy. Between the two of them they turned these hardened sinners into sentimental softies. What God couldn't supply George came through with. God furnished a rainbow and a baby with the croup, and George brought forth situations and ejaculations equal to the reformation of the most abandoned reprobates; between them they turned the trick. Blanco and Feemy lost that rotten feeling, and as the curtain fell their wings began to sprout. God was probably pleased; Shaw certainly was; and the audiences who witness the Stagers' production of "The Shewing-Up of Blanco Posnet" at the Peabody Play house this week get a whale of a kick out of it.

A Shaw play generally is the quintessential ambrosia of entertainment. This one-act burlesque of the American West and its religion is no exception. The irrepressible Shavian effervescence keeps it moving fast from first line to last. And the Stagers do their hit for the glory of the celestial due. Francis G. Cleveland as Blanco mixes subtle perception and incipient delirium tremens in just the right proportions. Philip Bourneuf does a masterly job of hypocritical piety as Elder Daniels. Aldrich Bowker, though erring occasionally on the side of the obvious, makes for the most part a delightfully comic sheriff. The rest of the cast, clear down to the twelfth member of the rough and ready jury, is eminently acceptable.

Preceding the Shaw play the Stagers present the first act of J. M. Barrie's famous unfinished mystery, "Shall We Join the Ladies?". Thirteen men and women are seated around a dinner table, thoroughly happy. Their genial host arises to respond to a toast, and before he sits again twelve people are through ly miserable, each suspected of the murder of the host's brother. For some fifteen minutes the finger of suspicion points alternately to each of the guests. The tenseness of the situation reaches a maximum; suddenly a scream is heard, the butler staggers in, ghastly pale, and the curtain falls. The audience is left to wonder which of thirteen possible suspects, each with some betrayal of guilt, is the murderer. Derby Brown, in the part of the host, first a beaming Mr. Pickwick and then a leering Mephistopheles, does a rare bit of acting which alone makes the play worth seeing.