Barry's second work for the stage, "The Youngest", was produced the following year to considerably less acclaim. The story dealt with a rich, provincial family who cannot accept the unconventional ways of one of its members. (This would eventually become a common Barry theme, handled more deftly in later plays.) Barry's third Broadway play, "In a Garden" (1925), served as a prototype for his classic comic works in which a gracious tone seems at odds with the often disturbing implications. "In a Garden" contains echoes of Luigi Pirandello, and in its ending alludes to the famous final scene that concludes Ibsen's A Doll's House, when Nora Helmer leaves her unsympathetic husband, Torvald. The play also makes use of phallic symbolism and refers to Sigmund Freud's theories of the unconscious. Theater historians W. David Sievers and David C. Gild wrote that the play is an "innovative 'psychodrama' that enacts therapeutic Freudian techniques in a theatrical context," a method Barry employed in later plays, such as "Hotel Universe" (1930) and "Here Come the Clowns" (1938). It featured a well-received performance by Laurette Taylor. Even though he knew it "would probably ruin the man who produced it" because of its calculated departures from Broadway formulae, "White Wings" was produced in 1926. It was a complete failure. Seen as a precursor to Thornton Wilder's "The Skin of Our Teeth", the play follows a group of proud street cleaners at the turn of the twentieth century; its theme is the increasing mechanization of life. Archie Inch, the protagonist, is caught between the "White Wings" (the men who clean up after horse-drawn carriages) and his sweetheart Mary Todd, who loves her father and the automobiles he designs which are a threat to the older way of life. The symbolism was not subtle, with the horses representing tradition and the motorcars representing progress. In comparison to other plays of that era about the modern work force, such as Eugene O'Neill's "The Hairy Ape" and "Dynamo", Elmer Rice's "The Adding Machine", and the dramas of Ernst Toller and Georg Kaiser, Barry's was taken less seriously and weakened by its comedic resolution. It closed after twenty-seven performances. In 1927, a year after the birth of his second son, Jonathan Peter, Barry took his family to France.