Dead End

Dead End (1935), a drama by Sidney Kingsley. [Belasco Theatre, 684 perf.] On a New York street dead‐ending at the river, a crippled, failed young architect, Gimpty ( Theodore Newton), sits sketching and observing the occupants of the new luxury apartments on one side of the street and of the tenements on the other. Among those he observes are Tommy ( Billy Halop), who exercises a precarious hold on his gang of youthful ruffians. Tommy's well‐meaning, loving sister, Drina ( Elspeth Eric), desperately tries to keep him on the straight and narrow, but Tommy leads his gang in stealing the watch of a rich boy who lives in the swank apartment house, and when the boy's father attempts to recover the watch, Tommy stabs him. At the same time, Babyface Martin ( Joseph Downing), once a gang member on the same street and now a major racketeer and murderer, returns on a secret visit to his mother ( Marjorie Main), only to find she will have nothing to do with him. He is killed by the police, while Tommy is hauled off to jail. Gimpty is left to comfort Drina and to continue his sketching. One highlight of the evening was producer Norman Bel Geddes's magnificent setting depicting the new high‐rise and the tenements. The front of the stage was a pier, and the orchestra pit represented the river, into which characters occasionally jumped. Reviewers took note of the fact that the play was housed at the Belasco, where in earlier years David Belasco himself had offered his own famous realistic settings. Dead End was hailed as a compassionate, forthright study of New York low‐life, although most critics were offended at what, for the time, was its shocking language.