When Ladies Meet by Rachel Crothers

When Ladies Meet is a favourite play, next to Sutton Vane's Outward Bound. Both were made into classic films, and the original stage versions can be read for free on the Internet Archive. Rachel Crothers was a prominent playwright, directing the New York premiere of her play in 1932 starring Frieda Inescourt and Walter Abel.

This comedy opens with cocktails on a New York apartment terrace, with Jimmie pleading his case to Mary—he's mad for her. Mary is an author of women's fiction—one of them very good—and thinks Jimmie is grand but lacks ambition. He deserves someone who will more than like him. The home is owned by Bridget, a woman of a certain age who gads about dropping malapropisms. That she was played by both Alice Brady and Spring Byington should tell movie buffs the giddy type she is. She is modern enough to have Mary and her current lover, her publisher Rogers Woodruff, to her Connecticut home for the weekend, ostensibly to work on the last chapter of her new novel. Everyone knows Woodruff is married, and nobody knows the wife.

A weekend in Connecticut at Bridget's country home. To break up Mary and Woodruff, Jimmie concocts a ruse to send him back to New York and arrives uninvited with his cousin Claire. He thinks Mary will see how lovable he is, and Claire has fun playing the part. They are welcomed in, and Claire and Mary take to each other right away. Mary asks Claire's opinion on her new book, as "women can't fool women - about women." It concerns a girl in love with a married man and her plan to live with him for a year to be sure their love is true before she lets him divorce the wife, who knows nothing. This is amusing and then alarming, as Claire is actually Mrs. Rogers Woodruff, her masquerade as a cousin just a bit of fun. Mary says the girl is still decent as he never loved the wife, it was already over; and Claire says the other woman ought to know enough not to believe a married man when he makes love to her, thinking it costs the wife little.

This play is an breezy read, with few sets and characters, mainly conversation. The idea that a house full of unmarried people sleeping over together brings up propriety that no one really cares about. Bridget is a terrific comedic foil for the general heartbreak.

This was a success on Broadway and has been filmed twice—a superior version in 1933 with Myrna Loy and Ann Harding, and again in 1941 with Joan Crawford and Greer Garson.

Rachel Crothers also wrote the play the Joan Crawford film Susan and God was based on, screenplay by Anita Loos.

I would love to find a physical copy of When Ladies Meet one day; I don't tire of reading it.

1932 / Available to read free online at archive.org / 164 pages