New Play in Manhattan

Many Mansions (by Jules Eckert Goodman and Eckert Goodman; produced by Many Mansions Inc.). Some bad plays, like tortoises, protect themselves by withdrawing everything--beginning, ending, and legs to stand on--under a shell of unassailable convention. Many Mansions' armor plate--the Church--does not succeed altogether in fending criticism from its vulnerabilities: its stiff dialogue, thin ideas, creaking earnestness. Nevertheless, the play's carapacious subject will probably save it from instant death.

In Scene I, a curly-haired youngster (Alexander Kirkland) gives up sweetheart and golf clubs when off-stage voices, quoting scripture, call him to the Church's service. Through 14 subsequent scenes, stern dominies keep this young, progressive zealot from his project of awakening the Church to "the demands of a changing world." They block his plan for a Church dance, they prevent his sheltering a pursued harlot, just as he has concluded that the Church is not all that it should be, his disapproving seniors unfrock him. He is glad.

Many Mansions was the product of a father-&-son collaboration. Jules Eckert Goodman, a weathered playwright (Potash and Perlmutter, 21 others), eagerly helped Son Eckert concoct his first play. The well-meant result is like Alice's Mock Turtle.

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