New Plays in Manhattan

The Merchant of Yonkers (by Thornton Wilder; produced by Herman Shumlin) is Thornton Wilder on a lark. The play, like the word, is rather out-of-date: Wilder has rewritten an old Viennese farce with no thought of streamlining it. The scene of The Merchant of Yonkers is Manhattan in the '80s. but old as the European theatre is the plot of the sweated apprentices who sneak off for a holiday, of their miserly old master (Percy Waram) on the hunt for a wife, and of the obliging Mrs. Fixit (Jane Cowl) who fixes things to suit herself. The slapstick is the same that, 200 years ago. drew tears of laughter from simple London cits and beefy German burghers: mistaken identity, boys dressed up as girls, people hiding under tables, lurking in clothes presses, listening behind screens, popping out of trap doors.

All this, in the old days lusty, ingenious, scatterbrained. Wilder seeks to recapture in a period spoof that is just short of burlesque. He neatly touches his stock characters and classic antics with quaintness and whimsical fancy. At his best, he gives The Merchant of Yonkers the nostalgia as well as the noise of an oldfashioned German street band. Where most modern farces have a hard, alcoholic hilarity, The Merchant of Yonkers for two acts romps and lets fly with all the innocence of a pillow fight. One of the best casts of the season throws the pillows for all they are worth.

Unfortunately in the last two acts the careless laughter begins to sound more like an old maid's skittish giggle. The characters become a little giddy, the author turns a little cute, the plot turns a little silly, and Director Max Reinhardt's German sense of gaiety turns alarmingly roguish. But the wonder is not that Wilder's old horse finally breaks down. The wonder is that it trots so gaily, canters so jauntily, for as long as it does.

Everywhere I Roam (by Arnold Sundgaard & Marc Connelly; produced by Marc Connelly & Bela Blau) is a hymn to the soil. It begins 100 years ago in a sort of prairie Garden of Eden. The toiling farmer drips with honest sweat, his steadfast wife brings him cool water from the spring, and Johnny Appleseed moseys by, planting apple trees.

Then the serpent enters the Garden: the harvesting machine is invented, the rail-road arrives, sinister-looking capitalists in plug hats turn up. Years pass; the farmer prospers, the rascally capitalists wax fat, the nation's fibre is weakened. Then comes 1929: the gorged capitalists expire of a gut-ache, the farmer is ruined and goes back to plowing.

There are good folk-dancing and singing in Everywhere I Roam, and fine pictorial moments. But the play itself is dull, and its message is hopelessly sentimental and confused. It is one thing to satirize the evils of predatory industrialism and hymn the praises of clean and sturdy toil. But it is nonsense to give the impression that hardship is better than ease, that back-breaking hours over a plow are beautiful, that the hand is quicker than the machine, or that the profit motive was first discovered shortly before the Civil War.

Don't Throw Glass Houses (by Doris Frankel; produced by Contemporary Stage). A smash miss.

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