By FRED NIBLO, JR.

Fortunately it is possible to praise the players without giving any undeserved credit to the play.  Those who saw the opening of Eugene O’Neill’s most morbid plumbing of the depths to which human nature can sink, at the Greenwich Village Theatre last night cannot deny that the cast of “Desire Under the Elms” is excellent – without exception.  So much for the acting.

The play itself will be hailed as realistic.  No one will call it an entertainment, but at the slightest suggestion of its foulness, many will rise to exclaim:  “But that’s life – that’s real!”  Sure.  So is a sewer.

“Desire Under the Elms” is also gruesome to the nth degree.  That is just another phase of its realism.  The story is that of a covetous pack of New England farming folk, and the particular object of their avarice is a worthless farm.  To do away with counter claims to its proprietorship, the boy in the play pays off his two older brothers and sends them to California.  His hard old father returns to the homestead, newly married to a lady who also covets the farm.  To cut off the younger brother in her own favor, she promises to bear the old man a son who, she hopes, will be the favorite.  The son in time arrives – but it is the son of the boy.  Upon learning of her deception, the boy decider to leave her.  But by this time she has fallen in love with him, and to wipe out the effect of her lie to him and thereby hold his affections, she murders the baby.

Curious though it may seem, the boy doesn’t take kindly to the baby’s murder – in fact, in a frenzy of paternal grief, he summons the law.  At last, however, he is loyal to her, declares himself a party to the act and the great lovers stalk heroically off in custody, for a final curtain.

Walter Huston plays Ephraim Cabot, the skinflint father, to perfection.  Charles Ellis and Mary Morris are good in their lurid parts.  Produced by the Provincetown group, “Desire Under the Elms” is effectively staged by Robert Edmond Jones.

This piece will possibly make money, but it is impossible for any one who cares anything about the theatre at all to approve of it – or even to disapprove silently.