New-Yorker Stadt-Theater

"A new, and at the same time, good comedy is a rare event on the stage of our Stadttheater.  Yet each finds its public and, in the process, the direction finds its account.  The house was again very well attended yesterday evening.  The comedy, 'The Marriage Invalid,' by the French gentlemen, Dumanoir and Lafarge [sic], and adapted for the German stage by J. [sic Julius] Lehmann, ran for the first time on our stage.  The piece is one of the better products of the modern French school; it is rich in piquant, interesting scenes.  [The plot] moves with great skill, [bordering] on the verge of the risqué, and if some of the [illeg. – possibly "braggarts"] emerged too strongly, then the blame lies at the feet of the performers who exaggerated too much.  For a first-time presentation, it was designated very good; the actors in the main roles put much effort into making their characters correct, which the audience recognized.  The play will be repeated today and to anyone who wants entertainment, we can recommend attending the same."

     Since the arrival of cooler weather, an active life prevails in the city: except for the opera, all the theaters are open again and mostly have full houses.  The visual ghost spits at those who live year in and year out for sensational drama, while it will disappear from the better theaters.  Until now, we were spared this ghost’s appearance at the Stadt-Theater, and, in general, one could be quite satisfied with the selection of plays.  As something new, “Ehestands­invaliden,” the French comedy by Dumanoir and Lafargue in Lehmann’s translation, was met with much applause.  This may well be the first modern comedy with no love-story base, and not even once was a love-affair episode woven in.  It is genuinely French: very lightweight fare, amusing enough, and pleasant to have seen once, rich in comic situations, but also with double entendres which were emphasized more than necessary by the actors.  [The play] is about the struggle between a newly-wed man, who only married in order to find peace after having gorged himself on all of life’s pleasures, and his mother-in-law, who, as the widow of a man who died just as she married him, wants to use her daughter’s marriage to capture the pleasures of life missing from her own marriage.  This struggle …