New Plays in Manhattan

Jeremiah (by Stefan Zweig; produced by The Theatre Guild). Biblical narratives have a way of being made into "plays" and coming out Biblical narratives. Jeremiah illustrates the jinx. When Zweig wrote it, as an Austrian pacifist in 1916, Jeremiah's thundering against Israel's war of conquest had tremendous timeliness. It might have tremendous usefulness today if it could be produced in Fascist countries. But simply as a play it is ponderous, labored, rhetorical. For the glow of Biblical diction it substitutes "Whither away?" and other pidgin Elizabethan. For the intensity of an ancient people, it substitutes stage mobs who jabber and shriek. Music caterwauls off stage. Puffed-up actors recite puffed-up dialogue. Around a table covered with brass pitchers and pottery the King and his counsellors gather, looking like Armenians about to polish off some shish kebab.

Only Jeremiah himself (Kent Smith) emerges with any dignity and strength--and he not as a person but as a kind of booming voice. Unfortunately, at the Guild Theatre, as in Zion of old, it is a voice crying in the wilderness.

One For The Money (sketches & lyrics by Nancy Hamilton, music by Morgan Lewis; produced by Gertrude Macy & Stanley Gilkey) is billed as an "intimate" revue. The authors, moreover, know what an intimate revue should be--crisp, topical, irreverent, with a small cast, an 11 o'clock curtain, a conversational tone, no green-and-purple spotlighting, no Bits of Old Baghdad.

But a perfect dish requires a chef as well as a recipe. One For The Money makes an endurable evening because it always seems to be going somewhere; but it never arrives. The best sketches--satires on Eleanor Roosevelt, parlor games, rabid Wagnerians--are full of fun but not really funny. The best lyrics trip off the tongue but do not lodge in the mind. The performers are gay and bright but, except for Author Hamilton and Brenda Forbes, have no more individuality than a buck private's uniform.

In spirit, One For The Money offers Cafe Society what Pins and Needles offered workers and Sing Out the News offered New Dealers. Indeed, in holding the lorgnette up to Nature it makes Noel Coward, at times, seem like a proletarian writer.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.