Big Names Rubbed Out

The Broadway season staggered into the Month of Birthdays with a famished look and faintly bloodshot eyes. Since Christmas night, not a new show--and only one revival, Porgy and Bess--had really managed to click on Broadway. There had been 16 shows in all, half of them by well-known playwrights--Clifford Odets, Charles MacArthur, Richard Brinsley Sheridan, John van Druten, Samson Raphaelson, Henrik Ibsen, Ben Hecht; and last week there was Marc Connelly. But this week Connelly had joined the rest: his Flowers of Virtue withered after four performances.

It has been one of the worst seasons in a generation. Such big names as Maxwell Anderson, Somerset Maugham, Kaufman & Ferber were rubbed out weeks ago. In over five months, not a single original play by a U.S. playwright has scored a real success. Noel Coward's Blithe Spirit and Patrick Hamilton's Angel Street are by Englishmen; Junior Miss is a hack dramatization of surefire short-story material. Only healthy child of Broadway this season is musicomedy, with Let's Face It!, Banjo Eyes, Sons o' Fun, Best Foot Forward, High Kickers.

Easiest explanation of the trouble is the war. The war, to be sure, has had a somewhat wavering effect on box office. (But no show has perished, save possibly the highbrow In Time to Come, which deserved to live.) The war has also had a slightly paralyzing effect on playwrights. Serious writers have found the world's present plight too big to cope with, yet only five out of 50-odd plays this season have tried to cope with it. Farces and comedies have flopped as fast, and been as feeble, as dramas, for the good reason that playwrights have shamelessly aped other men's hits, exploited worn-out formulas, slapped their scripts together overnight.

There also exists the feeling that in wartime standards can be lowered and the public will amiably make allowances. So far, the public has agreed to do no such thing.

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