On Stage:
SHIPLEY, JOSEPH I.
On STAGE Serious Plays Judged Harshly By Joseph T. Shipley THE MORE serious offerings of the early season have fared less well than those aiming solely at entertainment. Perhaps this is not fair;...
...Somehow, the play seems a plea for seeking a way of coexistence—a sort of anti-anti business inspired, no doubt, by lofty emotion but befuddled by maudlin thinking...
...ignoring them for a romp with Theresa would be like dancing on the edge of doom...
...Which leaves us All Summer Long.5 At least Robert Anderson, in this play that seems pulled out of a dusty drawer after the success of Tea and Sympathy, is not trying to preach...
...4 Sing Me No Lullaby...
...Therefore, Ben, who has spurned the help of the political boss when he ran for Congress, determines to run again and seeks that help—or any help, so long as he gets elected...
...How quick we were, on the other hand (myself, too, on the air...
...2 Home Is the Hero...
...The drama is about imminent doom...
...It is a war play which is too much like other war plays...
...At the Belasco Theater...
...By Marc-Gilbert Sauvajon and Frederick Jackson...
...Presented by the Theater Guild and Worthington Miner...
...Anderson does not face that question...
...3 Fragile Fox...
...The play is essentially sentimental, if by sentiment we mean emotion too great for the facts that seem to produce it...
...The sheer tumultuous play of personality of Tallulah Bankhead, for instance, swept several of our reviewers into the statement that Tallulah still commands the stage...
...to point out the flaws in such a play as Home Is the Hero,2 with its truly dramatic capture of the devastating consequences of a sense of sin...
...At the Coronet Theater...
...Presented by and at the Phoenix Theater...
...By Robert Anderson...
...in Walter Macken's play, we see how the "guilt complex" may insist on punishment that tears apart a whole family...
...Anderson's tale of two boys—a crippled adolescent and a youngster—building a pitiable wall to keep a river from undermining their house, while their elders scoff or go shuffling and quarreling about their petty concerns, is symbolic of the undermining of the family itself...
...And perhaps of society, too, by indifference, incompetence and self-concern...
...5 All Summer Long...
...as a consequence, instead of impressing they depress...
...There is a carefree, almost pagan little girl from next door, to suggest how joyous life might be, if...
...By Waller Macken...
...At the Morosco Theater...
...the danger from the flood is real and imminent...
...stops: If what...
...By the way, this success is burlesqued in one of the clever skits of the amusing I Feel Wonderful, at the Theater de Lys...
...They press too hard...
...Presented by Richard Aldrich and Richard Myers...
...By Robert Ardley...
...Mike the mathematician, hounded in the United States because he will not admit that he was wrong to have been "leftist" in the 1930s, has no way out but to conspire to go to Russia, via New Zealand, to work for the Reds...
...It is a case of an author being punished for the sins of his fathers...
...1 Dear Charles...
...And, we are told, he is "innocent," although he is wrong—his friend Ben assures him in sudden enlightenment—in feeling that he has only one choice...
...That puny man should deem his sins so important that a hell must be created for their punishment seemed matter for a condescending smile in Cabell's Jurgen...
...Built out of violence and profanity, with a villain of a captain drowning his cowardice in drink, and two hero lieutenants whom the privates love, it might find a welcome in Hollywood but somehow seems to have blundered onto Broadway...
...Unfortunately, the bickering family does not grow real...
...perhaps the critic, facing a play that seeks to rouse thought as well as laughter, begins to exercise his mind more rigorously and becomes harder to please...
...Off Broadway, but no less blundering, is the season's first adventure of the Phoenix Theater, Sing Me No Lullaby4 After a brilliant first year, the Phoenix has succumbed to propaganda, with an overwrought story contrived to make a point...
...The basic theme—that it is wrong to feel all choice must be between black and white, to consider all who are not one's allies one's enemies—is worthy of a drama, but this drama is not worthy of the theme...
...Just how Ben's acceptance of compromise wipes out Mike's contrary "error" it is hard to understand, and the fact that the political boss is Ben's mother makes the ethics no more exalting...
...But there one...
...the folks lose their tempers, they grow intense—all of them but the distressed, ineffectual mother...
...That, in truth, seems to sum up the seriously intended plays of the season...
...By Norman A. Brooks...
...Presented by the Playwrights' Company...
...Presented by Paul Vroom...
...and obedient audiences guffaw at her antics in Dear Charles,1 overlooking as piddling peccadilloes the many faults in this farce of an unmarried woman's three children by three different lovers...
...Adapted by Alan Melville...
...Fragile Fox3 is (mutatis mutandis, as they used to say) in much the same fix...
...Responsibilities still exist...
...The background in which the play is set, however, was richly exploited in the Irish theater a generation ago and largely laughed off the stage by Synge's The Playboy of the Western World...
...There is a good deal of surface emotion...
...But we are left unimpressed...
Vol. 37 • November 1954 • No. 44
