Old Plays in Manhattan

Broadway revived almost a record number of plays last week:

Lady Windermere's Fan (by Oscar Wilde; produced by Homer Curran in association with Russell Lewis & Howard Young) is second-rate Wilde and 54 years old. Its always trumpery plot, fitted out with soliloquies and asides, has become the quaint tosh of which burlesques are made. Its dialogue can be high-flown as well as sharp-cut, and some of its epigrams are distinctly tarnished.

But it has its very bright side too. It has some of Wilde's most glittering sayings ("Experience . . . is simply the name men give to their mistakes"; "I can resist everything except temptation"). It has some of the best fooling and chatter that Wilde, a master of both, ever wrote. It brings to high life a touch of style and more than touch of snob appeal. All this pleasantly gilds its tale of a Woman with a Past who Lady Windermere, not knowing it was her own mother, thought was carrying on with her husband; .and who smirched her reputation a second time to save her daughter's.

Last week's revival was saved by its dash, Cecil Beaton leading the way with his gaudily handsome sets and wonderful costumes. Not all the cast could keep up with him, but Estelle Winwood got robust comedy out of the gossipy Duchess of Berwick, and England's lovely Penelope Ward got style, presence, even a sort of believableness into the proud, priggish young Lady Windermere.

The Duchess of Malfi (by John Webster; adapted by W. H. Auden; produced by Paul Czinner), though one of the most famous of Elizabethan dramas, received its first Broadway production in 88 years. From a theatrical standpoint, there were possibly reasons to explain the delay. For all its magnificent flashes of drama and snatches of poetry, The Duchess moves slowly, mounts uncertainly, lets its fire go out between quick, bright blazes. It lacks, too, the humanity that a Shakespeare could fuse with horror; Webster's tale of the rich, widowed young Duchess who remarries in secret, fearing her rapacious brothers' wrath, and is stalked and finally strangled by them, has an air of chill, a sense of night.

Yet The Duchess could be far more impressive on the stage than it ever seemed last week. Even with Poet Auden's cuts* the play had, perhaps, to be slow of pace. But it did not have to be so barren of atmosphere or thin of texture. Nor need it have been acted, and frequently overacted, in so many manners with so little style. Only Elisabeth Bergner as the Duchess played with anything like stature. Passable in an important role, and using whiteface, was Negro Actor Canada Lee.

Lysistrata (adapted by Gilbert Seldes from the Greek of Aristophanes; produced by James Light. & Max Jelin) is built, as all the world knows, on a great satiric idea--that of having women end a long war by locking their mates out of their bedrooms until they give up fighting. Moreover, Aristophanes' lusty, ribald spirit still vibrates after 2,300 years.

But 2,300 years has seen one or two changes in stage method and technique, and only a very brisk and inventive production--such as Broadway got 16 years ago with Miriam Hopkins, Ernest Truex and Sydney Greenstreet in the cast--can make Lysistrata's joke funny enough for a whole evening. Last week's all-Negro production never even got off to a promising start.

Naughty-Naught (book by John Van Antwerp; music & lyrics by Richard Lewine & Ted Fetter) is a hiss-the-villain burlesque of turn-of-the-century college life--a sort of Frank Merriwell at Yale served up with beer & pretzels--that had a nice off-Broadway run in 1937. But such things have gone on & on since 1937, they are all much alike, and each one, to get by, calls for stronger drinks and steadier drinking than the last.

* And at least one addition, ascribing incestuous feelings to one of the Duchess' brothers.

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