By PERCY HAMMOND

It is the probable intention of Mr. O’Neill’s “Dynamo” to demolish not only the Old Time Religion but its substitutes, altheism and science, as answers to the riddle of this atom of the universe.  As seen by him the three of them fail in their endeavor to unlock the secret, and he leaves us at 11:10 p. m. as much in the dark as we were at 8:5.  All of the popular solutions are futile in “Dynamo,” from Holy Writ to Electricity.  The powerhouse is, as unsatisfactory a source of knowledge, according to Mr. O’Neill, as is the fundamentalist chapel, or the bench of the fool who saith in his heart that there is no God.  But, while further mystifying us in our gropings to find light from the Drama, Mr. O’Neill makes “Dynamo” an astonishing play.  It is sometimes ludicrous, frequently raving, often encumbered with laborious “interludisms,” and generally an entertainment for the rarer play-goer, Mr. O’Neill and the Theater Guild encourage us by a program announcement that he will continue his examination of “to-day’s sickness” in drama entitled “Without Ending of Days” and “It Cannot Be Mad.”

Living in theatrical propinquity to one another are the families of Rev. Hutchins Light (George Gaul), a hellfire and brimstone parson, and Ramsay Fife (Dudley Digges), a mean and scornful unbeliever.  The son of the evangelist (Glen Anders) is enflamed by the daughter of the scoffer (Miss Claudette Colbert), providing se-appeal for those Theater-Guilders who like a little romance in their clinical entertainments.  Hardy their adjoining cottages in a small town in Connecticut is a hydroelectric plant, whose wheels throughout the play give forth a siren hum.  For reasons not too clearly advertised, the preacher’s boy suddenly goes daft.  He has been a moony fellow, but his medications so far as Mr. O’Neill tells us have not been along the lines of the cosmic mysteries.  All at once, and in the midst of a stage thunder storm, he turns upon God with startling blasphemies, calling Him an “old Bozo” and daring Him, in the familiar manner of Mr. Sinclair Lewis, to strike him dead.

Thereafter he follows electricity as his Master and gets a job in the village power-plant.  Here, he thinks is the real deity.  Though to more unseeing persons it is but a minor  Public Utility, to him it is idol, shrine and laboratory.  He goes crazy in his worship of it.  He kneels in fanatic prayers before its dynamos and utters frenzied shrieks of worship.  Miss Colbert, in a leggy red dress, tries to distract his attention from the machinery to her own poetic person, and she succeeds in doing so in a scarlet interlude hidden by a virtuous curtain.  When he realizes that he has been untrue to Electricity he shoots her and then kills himself in as vivid an exhibit of electrocution as has been seen since New Your journalism photographed the Sing-Sing finish of Mrs. Snyder.

It seemed last evening that Mr. O’Neill had overdone the “aside” device and had used it more lavishly and with less excuse than in “Strange Interlude.”  He employed it to announce fact as well as to expose mental processes and the characters often were engaged in talking to themselves when they might better have been speaking to each other and the audience.  The  scheme last evening was a  crutch rather  than an inspiration . . . Mr. Digges as the shirt-sleeved unbeliever, was, as always, a fine actor; Mr. Anders let himself go maniacally as the futile wanderer among Mr. O’Neill’s spaces; Miss Cobert was snappy and decorative as the sex-interest, and Mr. Gaul played the preacher, accurately , in the fashion of the old and eloquent member of the Lambs Club.

Miss Catherine Calhoun Doucet’s endeavors to make a bitterly humorous role comic were excessive, and therefore successful; and there was the usual Guild excellence of production and direction to make “Dynamo” better than it really was.