A Somewhat Defective Comedy About the Defection From the USSR
SHIPLEY, JOSEPH T.
On STAGE By Joseph T Shipley A Somewhat Defective Comedy About a Defection From the USSR A Call Upon Kuprin. By Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee. From the novel by Maurice Edelman. Directed...
...About the only thing the Soviets carry on with efficiency and despatch, if one may judge from the play, is espionage...
...and when the list reveals nothing out of the ordinary, she tosses Soviet science into the Black Sea and dashes to liberty with her beloved...
...The constant claim that all is well and that everyone is free in this people's democracy is contradicted by the furtive glance, the pretended nonchalance when a plainclothes man is near, the many little signs of hidden fear...
...Leon Janney as the doubledealing Soviet agent...
...The other important woman, as portrayed by Lydia Bruce, is the most human figure in the play...
...For plot purposes only, therefore, and without the slightest resemblance to life, the Soviet security police chief lets Smith and his Russian sweetheart dash off to the West, on Kuprin's promise to stay behind and send more Soviet astronauts farther into space...
...indeed, under the pressures of the new regime, his mother has become insane...
...Sentimental moments aside, there is much to enjoy in the play...
...The opening scene in the Intourist Bureau at once sets the double level of talk and action: Everything goes according to regulations, but very little goes right...
...A Call on Kuprin has much that holds us...
...No secret service man would ever allow prisoners safely in his clutches to get away in such fashion...
...she makes a "catalogue" of the qualities of the American "Smeeth" to find out what leads her to love him...
...It would have been too harsh, on the other hand, to have left Jonathan Smith, the scientist's former pupil who is drawn in to help the escape while visiting Moscow, to languish in a Soviet prison...
...For Vera has been trained in objectivity, like a good Soviet citizen...
...As we know, there is often much more to-do about the single man that defects to the West than about the thousands that flee from the Iron Curtain lands...
...The men, who have the more melodramatic roles, convey them competently: George Voskovec as Kuprin...
...Jeffrey Lynn a bit too simple as Smith...
...Kuprin himself, because of the danger to his family, long suppresses his real desire to defect...
...its story is gripping and well told...
...Perhaps the President should launch a love crusade of Smeeths...
...The mother calls alternately on her servant Dmitri, dead for 20 years, and on the late Czar, as though he were still reigning...
...It would have been too simple and smug just to let Kuprin get away to the West...
...It gives many neat and subtle pictures of Soviet ways...
...At the Broadhurst Theater...
...Directed by George Abbott...
...The authors' hardest task, however, was to find a satisfactory ending to the play...
...Claude Horton as a bumbling British businessman who turns out to be an agent—the agent the Russian police easily circumvent...
...But in the meantime there have been illuminating and exciting moments...
...Except for the opening scene, which gives color but has little to do with the plot, and for the intrusion of romantic, "capitalistic" love between Smith and Kuprin's cousin, the play moves in melodramatic terms...
...It delays the final action with argument about Soviet and Western ideas of freedom, and it loses its punch when love breaks the final barriers as Vera and her Smeeth go off to the free world...
...The American Ambassador and a secret service man crisply coach the amateur Smith on the Embassy roof...
...third and best of the season's plays set in Russia, shows the Americans failing in their attempt to help a great Russian astrophysicist defect to the West...
...and the escape of Kuprin would have been wonderful publicity and free world prestige—in the play...
...And there is continuing inefficiency: While there are two hours a day of television, the TV set doesn't work...
...Presented by Robert E. Griffith and Harold S. Prince...
...She is given a frail and wispy poignancy by Eugenie Leontovich...
...This is too bad...
...they feed a trap with the Americans' own bait, and all the conspirators fall in...
...For Kuprin is the man that has made possible controlled, self-maneuvering flight among the stars...
...The Soviet agents are too shrewd...
...The head of the Russian security police is also a professor of the humanities, and has several lightning-change moments in his dual role...
...And perhaps the point is that the way to bring unity to the divided world is through love...
Vol. 44 • June 1961 • No. 24
