[In the following review, Nathan dismisses Fancy Meeting You Again, a play about reincarnation which Kaufman co-wrote with his wife, Leueen MacGrath.]

George S. Kaufman's Fancy Meeting You Again, in which his wife, Leueen MacGrath had a hand, deals with reincarnation, a subject that in one form or another was very appetizing to audiences in the early years of the present century. It was in that period that plays like The Road to Yesterday, written by a pair of elderly New England ladies who apparently believed quite seriously in it, and like When Knights Were Bold, written by a Britisher who believed it was just a lot of gumbo that would cash in at the box-office, attracted the impartial favor of our theatergoers. For the next two decades, however, the topic was forgotten until a believer who owned several million dollars' worth of oil wells in Texas thought it high time that it again be treated devoutly and confected something called The Ladder, which remains in history as the damnedest rubbish of its or any other era.

The exhibits of the genre, whether tolerable or awful, committed themselves in a general way to two plots. In one, advocated by the believers, it was argued that what you are in the present life is a reflection of what you were in previous incarnations and that if, for example, you have a long aquiline nose and are of a somewhat bellicose disposition you were once a Roman warrior under Caesar and before that in all likelihood an elephant. In the other, manufactured by those concerned only with an easy dollar, a comedian who jumped with fright every time the cuckoo-clock went off was involved in a sudden shift of scenery which disclosed him in a far past embodiment as a ludicrous knight in armor who, just as he was about to rescue the maiden fair from a murderous band of Turks, was scared into a dead faint by the screech of a hoot-owl.

Beginning with the late Thirities, reincarnation was discarded by playwrights as being altogether too rococo and idiotic and, preening themselves on their superior wisdom, they went in for what they were pleased to regard as scientific or psychiatric explanations of the delusion. Thus, instead of showing that their characters were something other than their contemporary selves in remote years, they attributed everything to Ouspensky's theory of spiral time, which proved, they assured us, that you lived through the centuries in an endless single pattern and that you are exactly the same jerk today that you were when you were playing house with Julia Agrippina in 42 a.d. and swindling the Earl of Shrewsbury's tailor out of a couple of suits in 1688. The playwrights who preferred psychiatry to any such complex hypothesis took an easier way out. If a character imagined, because he happened to break his wife's ribs while embracing her in joyous celebration of their seventieth wedding anniversary, that he was a reincarnated boa constrictor, they argued very simply that his mind was unhinged from having in his youth watched bartenders squeezing limes into gin rickeys and that the cure for his psychosis was milking cows. The circle was now at length spun 'round again, and it is reincarnation that once more tries to court the box-office.

As in the case of the When Knights Were Bold kind of thing, Mr. Kaufman and his collaborator have shrewdly elected to spoof the business and have written of a sculptress who cancels her marriage to a stuffy bore in the hope that a more likely candidate in the shape of the lover who pursued her in previous incarnations will appear in this to clasp her to his hungry bosom. The lover shows up in the person of an art critic, just to make things a little more complicated and a deal more fantastic, but after the usual misunderstandings everything is straightened out as usual and the couple as usual swoon in each other's arms.

The play which, as you have probably guessed, aims at nothing more exalted than selling tickets, consists mainly in a succession of gags, one or two of them comical and the rest of them not. The stage business is similarly at one or two times fresh and amusing and at all other times a reincarnation of what we knew in a much earlier period of our theatergoing. The scenery performs trickily as in other days, and so do the lights. And a number of the characters are veterans, including the female wisecracker, the starchy suitor, the sharp female committee member, and the inevitable figure from the other world dubbed, as always, A Visitor.

The box-office promptly spurned Mr. Kaufman's suit.