Summer Stock Market

"Straw hats" are back in style. When war cut short the Great American Summer Vacation, summer stock companies began folding fast; some 125 were operating in 1941, only 25 last summer. Last week,100-odd--91 of them employing Equity actors (at a $46 weekly minimum)--were already onstage across the nation; others were lurking in the wings, ready to pounce on July vacationers.

The names on the billboards were big and bright. A few of them: Dame May Whitty, Gloria Swanson, Gregory Peck, Thornton Wilder, Diana Barrymore, Helen Hayes & daughter Mary MacArthur, Gladys Cooper & daughter Sally Pearson, Edward Everett Horton, Gertrude Lawrence, Ann Corio, Jane Cowl, Lilian Harvey, Anton Dolin, Ginger Rogers, Dick Powell, Ruth Chatterton, Mady Christians, Faye Emerson Roosevelt, Victor Moore, Maurice Evans.

Taking their risks with the rest were a regiment of ex-servicemen. They had joined companies in force, and they had established at least three companies of their own:1) the Bridgeton (Maine) Playmakers, who brashly announced that they would have a Broadway hit this fall --Take a Treaty, a "political comedy" by "an official connected with the United Nations"; 2) The New York 54th Street Theater Company, a nonprofit experimental playhouse which announced an eight-week classic repertory season in Noroton, Conn, (first bill: Moliere's Georges Dandin and Goldoni's Mistress of the Inn); 3) Griffin Productions, most surprising--and-most commercial--of the three.

Griffin Productions' home, the Laguna Beach Playhouse, is only an hour's drive from Hollywood. The big idea is that actors bound hand & foot to the movies should like nothing better than a chance to do a real, live play of their own choosing. Griffin Productions will back them up with an Equity troupe.

Few of the summer theaters have any loftier aim than to make some money, despite inflated operating costs.*Ninetenths of the scheduled shows are old Broadway hits. About 25 companies plan to try out new plays--originally one of the big purposes of summer theater groups.

*For last week's Greenwich (Conn.) Theater run, Tallulah Bankhead got a cool $2,500; first-night orchestra seats at $4.80 per helped pay the freight.

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