New Plays in Manhattan

I'd Rather Be Right (book by George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart; music and lyrics by Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart; produced by Sam H. Harris). Like the Tower of Babel, I'd Rather Be Right had the handicap of a tremendous buildup. Advance rumors of its superexcellence implied that its like had not been seen on Broadway in years. Written and scored by the two liveliest teams of playwrights and music writers in the U. S., its lead played by one of the most endearing veterans of the U. S. stage, I'd Rather Be Right simply had to be good. And last week Broadway, to its delighted relief, saw that it was good.

When in the first scene 59-year-old George M. Cohan, answering to the name of President Roosevelt in top hat, cutaway and pince-nez, summoned his Cabinet to a meeting in Manhattan's Central Park, playgoers settled down to a show they expected to surpass Of Thee I Sing. But they soon found it was not as good as all that.

Compared to Of Thee I Sing, with which Author Kaufman, in company then with Morrie Ryskind and the Gershwins. won the Pulitzer Prize for 1931, I'd Rather Be Right is a buttoned, if glistening, foil. The Kaufman-Ryskind play took a swift jab at the heart of the body politician, and the late George Gershwin's "Wintergreen for President" summed up the whole oompah spirit of torchlit political nonsense in a single musical phrase. The new play pokes playfully at a dozen current problems, much in the manner of the semi-annual Gridiron satires staged by the Washington correspondents. The music, with no particular motif to follow, becomes largely a utilitarian accompaniment to fit the rhyme.

Despite its genial aimlessness, I'd Rather Be Right succeeds in venturing with impunity into an almost unprecedented form of satire. No stage has ever had such temerity in lampooning members of an existing government by name. Playwrights Kaufman & Hart call no bad names but give all the right ones.

P:In the genial person of Song-and-Dance Man Cohan. President Roosevelt admits that "the trouble with this country is that I don't know what the trouble with this country is."

P:Tall, bald Postmaster General Farley (Paul Parks) "Keeps his popularity forever hail and hearty, by finding jobs for everyone in the Democratic party."

P:Secretary of the Treasury Morgenthau (Taylor Holmes) boasts "I have achieved. you must admit, the biggest goddam deficit."

P:President Cohan confides: "I'm really quite a hero. I only have to say 'My friends . . .', and the stocks go down to zero."

P:The Supreme Court, made up to look like nine copies of Chief Justice Hughes, emerges from the park shrubbery to shout "No" at the President, pulls a final coup by declaring everything but itself unconstitutional.

P:To keep faith with audiences who have grown to expect a modicum of Yankee Doodle from Actor Cohan on any stage. the President closes the show with a typical Fourth of July speech about the U. S.. "A country where, if things are wrong you can get right out and talk about them. And . . . there aren't many countries like that left in the world."

Golden Boy (produced by the Group Theatre) came last week fresh from the vigorous, maturing pen of Playwright Clifford Odets to put up a convincing argument for plain speaking in the spoken drama, for the serious play as a good show. Its dozen scenes sketched the tragic story of a U. S.-Italian family caught in the toils of the prizefight business. Though it sometimes teetered on the brink of bathos, Author Odets' robust sincerity kept it from toppling over.

Golden Boy is not in the mass-attack tradition of the typical Odets power play. It singles out cross-eyed, spiritually tormented Joe Bonaparte (Luther Adler), studies his indecision between the violin and pugilism, traces the gradual disintegration of his character in the brutish environment of the ring, and brings him finally to the realization that the false ideals and broken hands of the fight game have ruined his chances for happiness, broken his father's heart.

Spark plug of the Group Theatre in recent seasons, with his outspoken Waiting for Lefty, Awake and Sing, Leftist Playwright Odets took to Hollywood last year, turned out melodrama that veered neither left nor right. That Hollywood has improved the Odets technique is apparent in the swift mounting of scenes, the extravagance of dramatic energy in Golden Boy. That his experience in the cinema has not lessened his power as a playwright of the masses is equally apparent. The Italian family of the play might have been sketched from behind the portieres of its own flat.

Odets' characters are most forceful when they speak the salty idiom of the street, least effective when he hoists them on flights of unnatural rhetoric. Most idiomatic performers in Golden Boy were: Robert Lewis, as the flat-voiced, grasping fight promoter, Roman Bohnen, a typical shoestring manager, and Jules Garfield, recruited from the lead of Having Wonderful Time, as a wisecracking taxi driver. Despite the handicap of an unbecoming Italian accent, the Group Theatre's veteran Morris Carnovsky is the convincingly pathetic Old World parent, bewildered by a reckless new generation. Hollywood's Frances Farmer, who spent the summer in barn repertory preparing for her Broadway stage debut, was inappropriately cast as "a tramp from Newark," her fresh-faced prettiness belying every tough trait she tried to show.

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