New Plays in Manhattan

Born Yesterday (by Garson Kanin; produced by Max Gordon) turns what could have been an angry sermon into an amusing evening. It deals with an ugly customer--a big-time racketeer. For roughneck, up-from-knavery Harry Brock, who has got his paws on most of the nation's junk yards, nothing talks but money, and nothing whatever talks back. But in slugging Harry, Playwright Kanin has saved his fists and relied on his funnybone. His menacing robber baron is also a slob and eventually a sucker.

Born Yesterday brings Brock to Washington, where he has bought a Senator, to try to grab off junk yards all over the postwar world. He installs himself, his henchman and his dumb blonde mistress in a fantastic $235-a-day hotel suite. Since there will be forays into official Washington society, he decides that the blonde had better get educated. His choice of a teacher is a crusading young writer on the New Republic. From there on everything in the play is predictable, but piquant. The young woman, who defines peninsula as "that new medicine," is soon taught words like antisocial and cartel. Her mind sharpens, her conscience stirs, and her amorous inclinations shift. She and her tutor get the goods on Brock, then march off to be married.

Born Yesterday is strictly a show, and one with more bounce than craftsmanship. The first act--with its picture of the home life of a baboon and his blonde--is delightful. After that, plot starts muscling in on character, and the show has its ups & downs. But things are kept moving by enough good gags and two topnotch performances. Radio Sports Announcer Paul Douglas makes a solid character--tough, vicious, yet somehow comic--of Harry Brock. Judy Holliday (Kiss Them for Me), with her flat voice, slow takes and floozie walk, is often wonderful as the blonde. When she sorts her cards in a gin-rummy game, Broadway gets one of the great comedy moments of the season.

Apple of His Eye (by Kenyon Nicholson & Charles Robinson; produced by Jed Harris) tells of a prosperous Indiana farmer (Walter Huston) who falls in love with his hired girl (Mary James). Knowing that he is old enough to be her father, he is not bold enough to ask for her hand. While his neighbors' tongues wag and his family's hearts sink, he squires the unsuspecting young lady to carnivals and Chinese restaurants, strains his eyes going without glasses, sprains his tack showing off as a wrestler. After much stewing, he sends the girl away. After much scene-stretching, she comes back.

Walter Huston is always a likable and skillful actor, and Apple of His Eye is a harmless enough little play--as rural and homey, at its best, as an old, dented tin dipper. But its shy and anxious courtship makes a long and languid evening. Farmer Stover shows twice the indecision of Hamlet without any of the excitement. The apple of his eye is a decent, agreeable girl but singularly unobservant. And the worried relatives, gabby neighbors and drawling farm help that punctuate--and protract--the evening are all stock-comedy figures.

January Thaw (adapted by William Roos from Bellamy Partridge's novel; produced by Michael Todd) celebrates a small, farcical civil war inside a Connecticut farmhouse. It is, indeed, a House Divided--between a city family that had bought and remodeled it, and a country family that, by the terms of the sale, could always move back in, and did. The two clans squabble over everything from politics to plumbing, from who-owns-what to who-sleeps-where. The city slickers always get the worst of it: their living room is commandeered for funerals and littered with pigs; they freeze and starve while the country folks go warm and well-fed; they imagine that the yokels' attractive son has eloped with their daughter. Eventually, of course, peace is established, and one family moves into the barn.

January Thaw uses one of those broad-comedy situations that can be funny for an act but is almost always fatal for an evening. Here very little is funny, even at the start. Beyond grinding out increasingly frantic variations on a single theme, January Thaw is always corny and often cobwebby in its humor.

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