New Plays in Manhattan

No Exit (translated from the French of Jean-Paul Sartre by Paul Bowles; produced by Herman Levin & Oliver Smith) is laid in Hell. For famed Existentialist Writer Sartre, Hell is a series of cramped, ugly hotel rooms; in one of them he locks up for eternity three repellent evildoers--two women and a man.

The man (Claude Dauphin) is a Paris editor who had been shot as a collaborationist; one woman (Annabella) is a Lesbian who, with cold deliberation, wrecked a marriage; the other woman (Ruth Ford) is a shallow nymphomaniac who had murdered her illegitimate child. Brought together in a Hell free from physical torture, they feel they may endure it if they resolutely keep apart. But they soon perceive the ghastly terms--and interminableness--of their damnation. They cannot keep apart ("Hell," says the man, "is other people"); they must endlessly frustrate and endlessly torment one another.

No Exit (Huis-Clos) is a piece of bold, unusual theater. Sartre sets his stage vividly, and sees things sternly through. Yet as the play proceeds, its original shock value is not reinforced by continuing dramatic impact. Perhaps, by its very nature, No Exit is itself damned to be dutifully repetitious and to dot its i's. The dotting process makes the later scenes--in which the characters bedevil one another--the weakest theater in the play; they should be the strongest.

No Exit is pretty much a showcase for Existentialism (TIME, Jan. 28). The gloom of the play meshes with the grimness of the philosophy. And the three damned characters--one treacherous, one selfish, one proudly evil--seem like arch-symbols of the disordered age from which so stark a philosophy emerged.

Christopher Blake (by Moss Hart; produced by Joseph M. Hyman & Bernard Hart) means more in terms of its author than of itself. As George S. Kaufman's collaborator, Moss Hart early won success writing smooth Broadway comedies. In these green pastures he might have stayed indefinitely in deep clover. But a strong impulse to keep moving led him to Lady in the Dark and Winged Victory, has now led him at last to seek even higher ground. Christopher Blake is a praiseworthy attempt to deal uncompromisingly with a difficult theme: the plight of a twelve-year-old boy whose parents are in court for a divorce, and who must choose between them.

Partly because of the material, more because of Hart's handling of it, the attempt does not come off very well. Christopher Blake poses a vivid situation, dramatic in the sense that it is climactic, suspenseful in that it awaits an agonizing decision. But it is too climactic a situation to be stretched through a whole evening without being blunted; beyond that it is a difficult situation for the stage because the real conflict goes on inside young Chris's mind.

Playwright Hart has tried manfully to grapple with these problems. He has filled things out by carefully documenting his situation--by tracing the causes of the divorce, dramatizing the refusal of either parent to hand Chris (Richard Tyler) over to the other, having both parents (Martha Sleeper, Shepperd Strudwick) appeal to the boy. (In the end he chooses his father.) And Playwright Hart has gone inside Chris's mind by bodying forth the conflicting fantasies that float through it--Chris reuniting his parents by killing himself just after being decorated by President Truman; Chris, a great man of affairs, visiting his parents in the poorhouse to denounce them.

The fantasies are noisily colorful, and there are strong realistic moments, as when Chris suddenly goes to pieces. Nor is there anything particularly false in what happens. There is just nothing freshly, uniquely true. Even so, Christopher Blake might be pretty effective theater if the writing were not often so flat, or the general effect so top-heavy.

In a largely indifferent production, talented, sensitive 14-year-old Actor Tyler shines by more than contrast.

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