BROADWAY'S BEST

...March in private life, is satisfactory as the benighted Mrs...

...A young newcomer, Jason Robards, Jr., has the part of the elder wastrel son...

...Even more stirring is the end of the second play when a young, anemic, lonely girl shakes off the domination of her mother and defends the ostracized army man in his moment of utter desolation...

...The O'Neill work is a masterpiece, ranking with the best that America's great tragic writer ever created...

...But it is quickly clear that the Tyrones—father and the two sons—are uncertain and uneasy...

...By all the lights of Gallic logic this play calls for harrowing tragedy...

...Last year at this time we were savoring from our home grown talent The Diary of Anne Frank, A View From the Bridge, No Time for Sergeants, A Hatful of Rain, The Lark, and The Matchmaker...

...In its own way, Jean Anouilh's The Waltz of the Toreadors is as fine an evening as any intelligent theatergoer could wish for...

...Two of the productions are by foreign playwrights, and one by an American dead for three years...

...Tyrone...

...Tyrone was the name O'Neill chose for his family.] These twelve years, Beloved One, have been a Journey into Light...

...The moment in the first play when the hitherto cold and vain wife, who realizes that her years are slipping away and she cannot face the years ahead alone, tries to make peace with the man she once spurned and drove to despair, is a triumph of insight...

...A sadly inappropriate gift it would seem, for a day celebrating happiness...

...One play depicts the meeting between a wife and her former husband...

...too long to wait...

...O'Neill was finally persuaded to release the play is something for which we are most grateful...

...Tyrone has returned from a sanitor-ium, presumably rid of her need for narcotics...

...his older brother was a failure and drunkard, his father a blathering pinch-penny...

...the spurned husband and army man are the creations of Eric Portman...

...With three such attractions available on Broadway, why should the year seem to be shaping up as a disappointment in general...

...You know my gratitude, and my love...

...For here, indeed, is a play that cannot but have a profound effect on anyone sensitive enough to receive its import...

...Evidently he had not been pleased with the reception accorded his penetratingly conceived The Iceman Cometh...

...Another was that there wasn't an actress in the American theater who could satisfactorily portray his mother...

...Whatever the reasons, the fact that Mrs...

...And John Abbott is superb as the bland visiting physician and old friend who knows the vagaries of life and love...

...Anouilh seems to have looked life squarely in the eye, felt most deeply its implications and its inadequacies and—laughed...

...Though he has lived for this love, in the end it betrays him...

...He sees his people with understanding and humanity...

...the other is a study of the reactions of a group of people when they discover that a retired army man who has been a guest at the boarding house has been arrested for molesting a strange woman in a movie house...

...Portraying the wife and girl is Margaret Leighton...

...Well, look at the three...

...Give great credit to those who insisted that a full quarter of a century would be tEWIS FUNKE l< drams editor of the N«w York Timet...

...Throughout all his plays runs the assumption that communication between human beings does not exist...

...In the current Broadway production, Frederic March gives one of the finest performances of his career...

...Not only does it reveal and help explain much that was O'Neill but it also, as all great literature must, holds up the mirror to ourselves...

...His plays have been described as "black or rose" according to whether he has decided to make us cry or laugh with his pessimism...

...In his dedication of the play to his wife, Carlotta, on their twelfth anniversary, O'Neill wrote, "Dearest: I give you the original script of this play of old sorrow, written in tears and blood...

...The reasons advanced for this limitation have been varied...

...In my opinion the unpredictable New York Critics Circle must surely select the Frenchman over the Anglo-Saxon...

...This year our writers do not seem to have much to say...

...Out of a totally different milieu from O'Neill's, Anouilh is one of the top three, with Henry de Montherlant and Jean-Paul Sartre, of the contemporary French theater...

...Through these years, though he has snatched at carnal pleasure whenever he could, he has never seduced the woman with whom he fell in love in his youth and who, it seems, has waited for him...

...Yet in the end General Saint-Pe discovers that the woman he has loathed but felt obliged not to hurt actually has betrayed him—and the woman he has loved has made a fool of him...

...The Waltz of the Toreadors is the story of the General Saint-Pe, a middle aged, comic-character general who for seventeen years has stayed within beck and call of a wife whose invalidism turns out to be self-inflicted by jealousy...

...But you will understand...

...That we are able to behold a work of this stature is most fortunate, because it is said that O'Neill himself stipulated that the work was not to be released until at least twenty-five years after his death...

...For the main role Sir Ralph Richardson has come from England to give us an hilarious portrait that encompasses both the cartoon-caricature qualities of the general as well as his wistful yearning...

...The third play, Separate Tables, really is two short plays, both of them studies in loneliness, tied together in that they have the same setting— an English seaside boarding house— and several of the same characters...

...As the elder Tyrone, who wasted his talent in the theater by devoting himself to roles below his capacities simply because they assured him against the financial insecurity he knew as a child, March digs deeply into the heart and soul of that tortured man...

...How, indeed, can Long Day's Journey Into Night fail to be regarded as the high mark of the 1956-57 theater year...

...All the time you should be tearful, you are forced to laugh not only because Anouilh has conceived his characters with the most sophisticated amusement but because he has a gift for wrapping up platitudinous conventions with his tongue stuck sharply in his cheek...

...Mildred Natwick, as the bed-ridden wife, never has been better, displaying all the erosive nagging of the vilest vixen...

...And Bradford Dillman's portrait of O'Neill as a youth, afflicted by tuberculosis, uncertain whether he can make his way as a writer and knowing already the hauntedness of his life, is touchingly true...

...Like it or not, drama demands a point of view...

...Long Day's Journey Into Night is an intensely personal account of the playwright's life in a family wracked by devils...

...I mean it as a tribute to your love and tenderness which gave me the faith in love that enabled me to face my dead at last and write this play— write it with deep pity and understanding and forgiveness for all the four haunted Tyrones...

...It is difficult to see how any of our native playwrights could surpass Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey Into Night...

...At this writing, with one or two exceptions, our playwrights this season have given us nothing but treacle and trash...

...In both plays, Rattigan shows a more serious vein and a more probing mind than usual...

...Still another reason—and this one perhaps the most valid-sounding—was that his son, at the time a professor at Yale, felt that release of the play would hurt him...

...Rising every inch of the way to this oddly exhilarating exercise is a splendid cast under the extremely expert ministrations of the veteran director, Harold Clurman...

...But Anouilh is not of the "all black" mood in this play...

...Amid the gradual shattering of their guilt-ridden hopes, O'Neill weaves his play until the final and decisive fourth act when the whole sad truth of the doomed Tyrones becomes incandescently manifest...

...General Saint-Pe is a lonely man who knows that his sundry amatory adventures cannot bring him the wanning comfort of love and that love alone could assuage his loneliness...

...Or is it that they have become so involved with psychoanalysis and its explanations of human behavior that they (momentarily, it is hoped) have lost sight of the fact that drama is conflict and conviction...

...For more than four hours, as it unfolds its grim story of a tormented family, it holds the spectator in its iron grip...

...Consider the remarkable achievement this play is...

...It turns out to be a rollicking farce calling for low-comedy performances...

...Both are extremely able and magnetic performers, and they give to Separate Tables a skill that helps make it one of the season's durable experiences...

...Florence Eldridge, who is Mrs...

...There have been indications that their hopes rest on the flimsiest foundations...

...This is a family that has been betrayed by selfishness, vanity, and the absence of that love to which O'Neill so pathetically and warmly referred in his dedicatory note to his wife...

...It is simply one of die facts of the theater that there are cycles of feast and famine...

...And, in the hands of one of the theater's younger directors, Jose Quintero, and a cast of top-flight players, all its values, implications, and spiritual illumination are correctly colored and portrayed...

...The play begins shortly after Mrs...

...The course thereafter is foreordained...

...One reason given after O'Neill's death for withholding the play was that he felt the New York stage was too commercial and unappreciative of his work...

...Now we have as popular hits Auntie Maine and Uncle Willie—hits largely because of their respective stars, Rosalind Russell and Menasha Skulnick...

...The reasons for the drop of the graph are difficult to assess...

...Sprawling as it is—and it could have been cut—it nevertheless has a spellbinding fascination that only infrequently slackens...

...As for the foreign importations, the race, without doubt, is between Jean Anouilh's The Waltz of the Toreadors and Terence Rattigan's Separate Tables...

...what he does with it is one of the season's treasures, fn the big fourth act, wasted though he is by a dissolute, futile existence, he rises to power and vigor that electrify the audience...

...His modier, according to the play, was addicted to narcotics, the result of a quack doctor's ministrations...

...Underneath the farce, however, the play is full of sardonic bitterness, wistfulness, and a touch of inescapable poignancy...

...But several factors are apparent...