Writing a play for Miss Ina Claire must be a very pleasant task. Her physical loveliness, effervescent gaiety, calm sophistication and utter femininity have endowed her with a theatrical individuality which makes it necessary for her playwright only to give her reasonable opportunity to flutter about and be her charming self. "Biography" contented itself with filling this bill and consequently was a diverting and successful bit of lightness. In an attempt to recapture the mood (and the success) of this production the Theater Guild has enlisted the talents of playwright S. N. Behrman, stage-designer Lee Simonson and director Philip Moeller. The resultant concoction has been symbolically, if unseasonably titled "End of Summer" and is now going through a formative period of incubation at the Colonial prior to its New York flowering.

Too Much Complexity

The mixture of metaphor is intended to indicate that the Guild's most recent offspring is a problem child who shows an upsetting complexity of behavior. Perhaps because he felt that Miss Claire is in danger of becoming stereotyped, Mr. Behrman has apparently sought to make his work more than the simple amusing bubble it ought to be. Instead of concentrating, as is customary, upon Miss Claire's emotional life, he has built a play of many characters and even more numerous problems. He has gathered, into a sunlit Maine summer palace, three generations of the Wyler family with their variegated friends, conflicting ideals and confused emotions. The old grandmother is of the rugged pioneer genre and is confused by the complexities of the new problems. Her fortune was made by the frank ruthlessness of the oil magnate and she is upset by the emotional unstability and radical thought of her granddaughter and her friends. Between the two extremes, the second generation is represented by her daughter, Leonie (Miss Claire) whose only quest is for affection and amusement.

Lampoons Radicalism and Freud

About this structure is woven a maze of personal and social problems which seem to have been selected solely in the aim of giving Mr. Behrman opportunity to lampoon radicalism and Freud, two sure-fire sources of sophisticated fun. There is a goodly sprinkling of amusing chatter but the procession moves nowhere, which leaves this reviewer a bit unsatisfied. It would be exceedingly pleasant if one could accept the production as an amusing social comedy but when grave problems are seriously injected, one naturally looks for maturity of thought as well as cleverness of execution. One is thus compelled to note that "End of Summer" is an amusing play which makes the mistake of sliding off the plane of pure comedy and getting unnecessarily mixed up in the complexities of problems that properly lie beyond its scope. Fortunately Miss Claire's charming manner and the excellent acting of Osgood Perkins and the assembled company go far in restoring the play to a more comfortable level.