New Plays in Manhattan

Deep Are the Roots (by Arnaud d'Usseau & James Gow; produced by Kermit Bloomgarden & Ge"brge Heller) is a bad play that is yet worth seeing. Artistically it is crude; psychologically quite false. But as melodrama it proves lively theater, as social drama it provokes thought; and the production has much of the skill that is wanting in the play.

In Deep Are the Roots, the authors of Tomorrow the World bring a Southern Negro back from war to the Bourbon Senator's household in which he grew up. Having become an officer, a hero and the accepted equal of white Europeans, Brett Charles (Gordon Heath) has a new and far less subservient conception of himself and his race. When he takes some trifling liberties, the Senator (Charles Waldron) gets so blazing mad, so hell-bent on punishing the boy, that he pins on him the theft of a missing watch.

The melodrama in Deep Are the Roots saves the evening but spoils the play. Until the Senator turns so viciously on Brett, he is portrayed as an unthinking --but not at all unfeeling -- reactionary. Hence, the authors suddenly seem as much out to frame him as he is out to frame Brett. Time & again, in fact, they butcher character in order to build up plot. Result: their melodrama, which could have vivified their social drama, merely vitiates it.

But melodrama alone does not spoil Deep Are the Roots. The play takes on too much and roves too widely. The sharp, immediate problem of the returning Ne gro soldier gradually becomes blurred by almost all the chronic interracial conflicts of the South, including the last one likely to prove dangerous, intermarriage.

Nonetheless, Deep Are the Roots has social as well as theatrical impact because, though it botches its problems, it never blinks them; though the evidence is suspect, the indictments are valid.

Under Elia Kazan's (The Skin of Our Teeth, Jacobowsky and the Colonel) able direction, a good cast works hard and well. Topping it, in the role of the Senator's younger daughter, is Stage Designer Norman Bel Geddes' charming, 22-year-old daughter Barbara. With only a brief career of small parts behind her, she may well stand out as the best ingenue of the season.

You Touched Me! (by Tennessee Williams & Donald Windham; "suggested" by D. H. Lawrence's short story; produced by Guthrie McClintic) is dubbed a "romantic comedy." Few romantic comedies have either soared with so much message or stooped to so many monkeyshines.

Playwrights Williams (The Glass Menagerie) and Windham are soapboxing for Life, Growth, Fulfillment and the Future. They set these abstractions up in an English country house, and arrange a match against Stagnation, Snobbishness, the Status Quo, Prudishness and Decay. On Life's side, along with a young flyer, is the young heroine's father (Edmund Gwenn), a rum-soaked old sea captain full of Elizabethan gusto; on Stagnation's side is the heroine's aunt (Catherine Willard), a snooping spinster full of Victorian gentility. The trouble with such highly contrasted symbols is that they themselves are virtually burlesques: almost everything the old maid does smacks of melodrama, almost everything the old soak does smacks of farce.

As a result, You Touched Me!--despite some lively dialogue and amusing moments--is a gallimaufry of didactic speeches and romantic nourishes, with the authors so busy extolling Life that they do little to create it.

The Ryan Girl (by Edmund Goulding; produced by the Messrs. Shubert & Albert de Courville) would be an old-fashioned melodrama if anything melodramatic happened. The plot concerns a gangster and a Follies girl (Edmund Lowe & June Havoc) who let another Follies girl (Doris Dalton) adopt their infant son. Twenty years later the son is a famous hero of World War II, and the gangster sneaks back from his Venezuelan hideout, figuring to beat a murder rap by making known his relationship to the boy. But mother love, fierce if belated, has something to say about such caddishness, and says it with a gun. The gunshot is the final act--and the only action--in the play.

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