"The true story of a woman's consuming passion for a man. The Cobra Woman charms with the fascination of the snake and the subtlety of the vampire. She deals with secret emotions".

Such, at least, is the way the program feels about the leading lady in "Cobra", now playing at the Plymouth Theatre. The audience was obviously much of the same mind, for it found the emotions anything but secret, and led on the consuming passion with relish. The audience devoured the Cobra's every move; it tolerated the other players. After her cremation, the other players. After her cremation, the situation became powerful enough to keep everything on the run, including the playwright. He put up a game fight, however, until the situation got the better of him at the end of the last act; he shuddered, uttered a desperate anticlimax, and succumbed. The audience paid no attention to his fiasco, but was satisfied with the thrills that has gone before; well-schooled by the happy ending-at-all-costs movies, it was already groping for its bat under the seat.

Not only near the final curtain, but throughout the play Mr. Brown displays an irritating amount of slovenliness in his writing. Thus two of the six characters appear in the early stages of the play for insignificant reasons, and than exit into obscurity--loose ends unconnected with the remainder of the plot. Rosner, for example, has apparently no better excuse for being in the play than to provide the hero with the indispensable automatic. The gun, together with an unemptied waste basket, remains conspicuously placed in the office of a busy business man for twenty four hours; of course nobody disturbs it because on the following day the business man, in the course of melodramatic events, must toy with the suicide idea. For this an automatic is indispensilge; we know, because we have tried it many times.

The Elis come out with their usual small end when being reproduced on the metropolitan stage. This is all natural enough, but in the midst of our indifference we must rise to point out that even Yale men are not as hopelessly namby-pamby as the two undergraduates in the first act who slap, each other on the back and begin all their remarks with "Well, you know, old man".... Messrs. Glibert and Morgan farther removed this dialogue from the sublime by the would-be kittenish manner in which they threw boxing gloves at each other, always taking the greatest pains to miss.

In the later acts these two appear as better actors, for the playwright gives them four years in which to outgrow the advantages of a Yale education. Miss Anderson shines equally brilliantly as girl and woman, in fact, the more so for having to do both; lately her part has been taken by Miss Bunyea. Miss Moores provides the happy ending in the approved fashion, while Miss DeMe and Mr. Horton perform their superfluities satisfactorily.