The New York Times, March 21, 1930. PAGE NUMBER 34
‘Thomas Paine’ Presented
New Group Has Premiere at Macdougal Street Playhouse.
Thomas Paine, a play in two acts and nine scenes from the German of Hanns Johst, translated by Adolph Klarmann and Helen Schlauch. Staged by Robert Rossen; settings by William Snaith; produced by the New American Theatre. At the Macdougal Street Playhouse.
Christopher Stone ……… Milton E. Goldstein
Greene ……………………… Tommy Page
Joe ………………………….. Ralph Graves
Washington ………………… Jay Rand
Grignan ……………………. Charles Brooks
Laurens ……………………. Cleon Everett
Adams ……………………… Ralph Traeger
Paine ……………………….. Marc Lawrence
Young English officer …….. Martin Haskell
Tornay …………………….. Leonard Jacobson
Chabot …………………….. Martin Friedlander
De Villiers …………………. Joseph Collins
Louis Capet (Louis XVI) ….. Jacques Knapp
French sea captain ……….. Louis Kenneths
American colonel ………….. Jack Oelbaum
Portmaster ………………… Louis Siston
The latest group to take over the Macdougal Street Playhouse ambitiously refers to itself as the New American Theatre. Last night the first production was given, a play from the German about Thomas Paine, the deist and free-thinker who figured in both the American and French Revolutions. The career of this inconoclastic firebrand should be lively and interesting material for the theatre, but even discounting the performance of one of the most hopelessly nonprofessional bands of actors ever assembled on a stage, “Thomas Paine” emerged last night as a singularly dull and declamatory piece of work. There were times, to be sure, when it showed promise of rising above the acting, but for the most part it was treated no worse than it deserved.
The play, with several lapses from historical fact, traces the life of Paine from his first connection with the Pennsylvania Magazine at the outset of the American Revolution. It carries him to Paris, shows him meeting Louis XVI and insists that he spent seventeen years in a French prison. Of his religious beliefs and his “Age of Reason” there was no mention through the eighth episode, when another reporter joined a rapidly departing audience.
The play was acted by an all-male cast. They were amateurs and there is no reason to believe that they are not destined to remain so.