AUSTRIAN SHILLING ALLOWS STUDENTS
      TO SEE NAZIS AS THREE LITTLE PIGS

            For the price of one Austrian shilling, twenty-one centers in good American money, Brooklyn College students stepped from the prosaic world of undone homework and ungettable books to the romantic world of Lilliputian characters and noble thoughts. This presentation of human life in miniature was offered by Dorothy Zaconick, an Austrian refugee, who pledged herself to present puppet shows in colleges to raise funds for the victims of Hitlerite oppression. Her marionnettes cut their capers throughout the capitals of Europe.

            And last Wednesday this puppet show of international repute, which was directed, constructed, manipulated, and written by Miss Zaconick, was performed for the first time before a receptive Brooklyn College audience.

            The first play, Mickey Mouse in Vienna, written in simple German, portrayed the difficulties of those famous Americans, Mickey Mouse and his wife Minnie. Our unfortunate hero and heroine got into all sorts of trouble because of their ignorance of German. But inability to speak German was only a slight mishap, for anon Hitler and his army took the stage. The grand army consisted of three little pigs, who submissively obeyed his Excellency's every command.

            During the intermission between the German play and the sophisticated comedy of manners, Dorothy Zaconick manipulated a puppet which was a miniature edition of herself, dressed in her working uniform of blue overalls. Then another puppet made up as that famed comedienne, Beatrice Lillie, sang one of her songs, "There are Fairies at the Bottom of the Garden."

            Then came the short one-act play, Curtain, Please, concerning the amorous and slightly risque antics of the greatest actress in France and a hayseed country boy who writes plays for her. The situation was a ticklish one written in a dangerously careful manner, and the settings for the actress's boudoir were very lovely. We had hardly caught our breath when the bell thrust us from the magic world of make-believe to the familiar one of labs and learned professors.

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May 20, 2004