Recent Arrivals On & Off Broadway
SHIPLEY, JOSEPH T.
On STAGE By Joseph T Shipley Recent Arrivals On & Off Broadway The Warden of the Tomb. By Franz Kafka. Translated by Saul Colin. These Cornfields. By Georges Courteline. Adapted by Eric Bentley....
...France Nuyen as Suzie is fetching, but doesn't have rich enough material to fetch...
...The last, an elaborate but amusing intrigue on the same subject as Shakespeare's Love's Labor's host and Gilbert and Sullivan's Princess Ida-a recluse from society brought back to love-shows Maria Casares as the Princess disguised as a man, and Jean Vilar as the philosopher, a cross of Polonius and Malvolio, in a production where the playing's the thing...
...For we have to watch the sluggish movement of a saccharine story, with artificial edgings toward a triangle, before the lovers reach their happy end...
...At the Broadway Theater...
...Peggy Wood and Imogene Coca, in their hotel suite, work with maidenly persistence to give life to figures the author has given gadgets and gags...
...It is illuminating to note the questions and frequently shrewd comments...
...And, instead of a saccharine story, The Girls develops its situation with contrivances and cracks...
...Sweet sentiment oozes...
...Audience participation has been approached on Broadway, in occasional meetings after controversial plays: here it becomes a regular and informal feature and it deserves strong recommendation...
...Le Theatre National Populaire...
...Suzie the whore is a darling Robert takes to his heart long before he takes her to his bed...
...Presented by S. Hurok...
...seats are free...
...Directed by Joshua Logan...
...Directed by Bretaigne Windust...
...By Paul Osborn...
...But everybody in the play is either a scoundrel or a fool...
...The lawyer, the social worker-"Why did I pick this job...
...Presented by David Merrick, 7 Arts Productions, and Mansfield Productions...
...From the book by Richard Mason...
...Saturdays at the Dramatic Workshop...
...Admirers of good acting will want to visit the Broadway Theater, to see the company the French Government organized to present great plays at popular prices...
...The play has but one rather dingy set, in the decaying New York hotel, and, though reporters and busy-bodies slip in, the main action is limited to the old dame and her niece and the professor of journalism who comes out of it engaged to the wealthy lassie...
...They give engaging actresses little chance to show their skill...
...The World of Suzie Wong centers upon a brothel with eager women, and Suzie embracing all comers to support her infant-even after she and artist Robert have fallen in love...
...Everybody has a heart of gold...
...Asked by the Cardinal to tell who wrote to her suggesting illicit amours, the Marquise replies: "I am confessing for myself, not for anyone else...
...the politician, the professor, the drama critic unseen on stage-all are lashed...
...Deftly translated by Saul Colin, it pictures a Prince whose ancestors seem reaching from their graves to help him in a present crisis...
...Le Theatre National Populaire works in the finest French tradition...
...The World of Suzie Wong...
...It is colorful with the bright costumes and high-slit skirts of the whores, and busy with sailors who buy the waiting wares...
...The Girls in 509, on the other hand, are two maidens, a staunch old DAR Republican and her simpering niece, who shut themselves into a hotel suite the night Roosevelt was elected in 1932...
...The piece is followed by a short farce of Georges Courteline's...
...At the Broadhurst Theater...
...The two plays have one point in common...
...The warden-as unwitting of the portents around as Macbeth's porter or Cleopatra's farmer with the asp-holds back the eager dead...
...At the BeJasco Theater...
...This in turn is followed, every Saturday night, by something that can become significant in the theater: discussion of the evening's production by the audience...
...I hate people...
...The Girls in 509...
...It is not until this crowded year of 1958 that they learn the Republicans are back in office...
...The two plays share one other thing, but it can hardly be called a point: both began with promise and through the evening grew vacuous and dull...
...Its current repertoire varies from the tumultuously surging Florentine melodrama Lorenzaccio by Alfred de Musset to the more stately and more familiar Marie Tudor and he Cid, Moliere's Don Juan and, at a distant but delightful extreme, the artificial comedy by Marivaux, he Triomphe de l'Amour...
...The play spreads, with quick-shifting scenes, from ferry through crowded streets and barroom and cheap hotel in Hong Kong...
...In repertoire: of French, plays...
...By Howard Teichman...
...Phone the Dramatic Workshop, in the Capitol Theater building, for reservations...
...Two of the plays in English, which opened on successive nights, are oddly contrasting...
...The two maidens themselves are not committed because the psychiatrist says that, considering the world for the past 26 years, it's the ones that stayed outside who are crazy...
...Lorenzaccio, written in 1883, has a curiously contemporary touch...
...ADMIRERS OF Franz Kafka will want to see his one play (The Trial was dramatized by other hands), a foreboding fragment called The Warden of the Tomb...
...Presented by Alfred de Liagre Jr...
Vol. 41 • November 1958 • No. 40
