The Milwaukee Leader

Meet Fat Man Humidor.
Benefactor of Theater

FAT PERSONS make the best theater audience. Not alone do they radiate humor but, what is more, money in the pockets of the manager, heat and humidity.
So at least says Prof. Edward F. Miller of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. More than that. He has found that exciting plays and motion pictures cause the temperatures of audiences to rise and result in the throwing off of bodily heat that judicious theater owners utilize as a substitute for fuel. Prof. Miller claims to have made actual tests on theater audiences in Boston playhouses and found many theater owners observing the phenomenon lowered their heat supply as acts approached their climax.
That explains why the blase critic feels a draft as the climax approaches and leaves before he has caught cold.
It may also explain why some of the "hot" plays coincide with a cold wave.
The judicious theater owner plans his schedule in accordance with the weather forecast. Further it discloses why a fat person has a better chance of getting a "comp. Fat heads--dead heads, will, henceforth, be the maxim in judging the make-up of an audience.
If Prof. Miller's calculation is correct, the Green Room club could turn off the steam entirely when Schnitzler's Reigen is presented for its benefit a week from tomorrow at the Belasco theater. New York. It could also dispense with the beefsteak dinner which is scheduled to precede the performance and at which Otto H. Kahn will be the guest of honor.
Reigen which is not, as New York reporters insist, a play but a series of topically connected one-acts will be given in its entirety. Those who have read Reigen will be amused to hear that the parts of the women will be played by men, in accordance with the club's tradition. It will be a stag affair throughout, as admission will be to males only, at $5 per.
Statements that Reigen has never been produced in this country, and that it's a safe bet it never will be, are not correct. The German company in Chicago played it in Chicago last December for an entire week. I recall having read some press comments indicating that the reviewer, like the bigger part of the audience, enjoyed the "Schweinereien," but failed to see the psychological and artistic premises from which the author proceeded.
Wonder how the theater reviewer of The Wall Street Journal will take to this Reigen performance. Will the presence of Kahn, the banker, influence his attitude toward sex problems on the stage? Ever since the Sholem Asch drama, The God of Vengeance, made its appearance On Broadway The Wall Street Journal has tried to invoke, in turn, the censor, the Ku Klux Klan, the Knights of Columbus and "other influences for protecting the morals of the community" against further performances of that play. The only response The Wall Street Journal has received so far was a notice that owing to the increased patronage given The God of Vengeance at the Greenwich Village theater the play would be removed to the Apollo, an uptown theater of greater capacity.
Incidentally, with the announcement that the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, Paris, has instituted a campaign against animal acts, following a similar movement in England, comes a report that George Arliss plans appearing in an anti-vivisectionist play, The Cloak of Science, written by a certain James Henry O'Brien. Also that Ralph Spence, occasional contributor to Ziegfeld's Follies, has written a mystery play, The Ape, and that Henry Myers' The Blond Beast was given a matinee tryout.
Not so long ago they produced The Insect Comedy. At the beginning of the season we had The White Peacock, and next week will see the return of The Bat.
In the musical field we have had Saint-Saens' The Animal Carnival, Stearns' The Snow Bird, Carpenter's Krazy Kat, not to forget Turkey in the Straw and the numerous nightingales, butterflies and bees that, since Schubert and Schumann, have caused finger and head aches to prospective virtuosi.
What are anti-vivisectionists and cruelty-to-animal-preventors in this country going to do about this situation?
BARBARA LAMARR-Merrill
FREDA JAEHRLING-Pabst.