New Plays in Manhattan

Escape This Night (by Robert Steiner & Leona Heyert; produced by Robinson Smith) will be remembered, if at all, as "the mystery story laid in the 42nd Street Public Library." For out of a welter of irrelevant, incompetent and immaterial crimes, what jut up solidly are Designer Harry Homers amazingly clever reproductions of Manhattan's famed library--reading room, Braille room, entrance lobby, even one of the snooty stone lions that guard the portals. Roaming through the vast institution with more sinister motives than are common to real life, a blind woman (Ellen Hall), her husband (Arnold Korff) and a good many other people get into a good many messes, read very few books.

Escape This Night is passable entertainment considering that its melodrama is as terrifying as Little Lord Fauntleroy, that its plot is as carefully insulated from the audience as a live wire, that the eventual solution is not the least part of the mystery.

Trojan Incident (produced by the Federal Theatre). With three current hits in Manhattan (Haiti, Prologue to Glory, . . . one-third of a nation . . .), the Federal Theatre last week recklessly plunged more than 3,000 years into the past in quest of a fourth. Drawing chiefly on the Trojan Women of Euripides, Trojan Incident relates the aftermath of the most famed of all wars, shows the Greeks leading the women of Troy into slavery and concubinage.

To tell its story, Trojan Incident leaps frenziedly in all directions, snatches at pantomime, dancing, choral singing like merry-go-round riders snatching at a brass ring. Artistically a desecration of Greek drama, Trojan Incident has nevertheless a mongrel excitement of its own: the tale flushes with pathos and movement, and some of Wallingford Riegger's music, such as the narrative chant The Song of the Horse, gives the story a rhythmic speed.

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