A GOOD WOMAN KNOWS HER BUSINESS

"This Woman Business" at the Copley aids and abets Holbrook Blinn's current dramatic heresy. Like "The Play's the Thing", it has a cast of six or seven men and one woman, in open defiance of all the best books of dramatic technique--by ladies who have written pageants for the Cope Valley Community Players--which claim that the female must appear in strength numerical as well as sexual. Walking in beauty from out the wings is supposed to add that intangible repondez s'il vous plait without which no galleries will be filled. We all know now what a lot of nasty feminist propaganda this is. Give Cecil Dixon the eyes wistful and blue, and riding breeches that fit in that certain way, and about nine o'clock it becomes fairly easy to predict the chances of our side.

"This Woman Business" passes three acts in the agreeable proof of that old psychological fact--you can't win. A six months orgy of bachelordom of all the Copley males except Mr. Clive is interrupted by Miss Dixon, who uses the assets acknowledged above to gain herself five slaves and one husband. The gaining thereof is a lesson in a technique older and more rigid than that on the stage.

"This Woman Business" is good farce, rarely overacted, and better than "The Ghost Train". The first act, a medley of devices for stalling for time, is ideally suited to the risibilities of any audience, including the Elizabethan. Harvard men will be interested in an attempt to put on the stage in musical comedy plot two characters of embarrassing resemblance to prominent members of the English Department.