The Animal Kingdom

Animal Kingdom, The (1932), a comedy by Philip Barry. [ Broadhurst Theatre, 183 perf.] Tom Collier (Leslie Howard) has summoned his father (Fredrick Forrester) and his friend Owen Arthur (G. Albert Smith) to his home to announce his intention to marry Cecelia Henry (Lora Baxter). Owen insists Tom and Cecelia have not one thing in common and information slips out about Tom's longtime mistress Daisy Sage (Frances Fuller). When Tom visits Daisy to tell her of his wedding plans, Daisy is pained but understanding. Studying a picture of Cecelia, Daisy warns Tom, “Look out for that chin.” After the marriage, Cecelia becomes possessive and intrusive. She forces Tom to fire his houseman (William Gargan), whom she doesn't like, and interferes in his business affairs. When she doesn't get her way, she has convenient headaches or even locks the door against her husband. Taking his rehired houseman with him, Tom leaves Cecelia. He tells his houseman, “I'm going back to my wife.” Of course, he means Daisy. In his preface to Barry's collected plays, Brendan Gill wrote that The Animal Kingdom “is a comedy simple in theme and economic in plot . . . the dialogue is at once the wittiest and most natural‐seeming that Barry had yet achieved.”