Old Play in Manhattan

Craig's Wife (by George Kelly; produced by Gant Gaither) is just as unpleasant as she was 21 years ago. But she is still pretty fascinating. Playwright Kelly's Pulitzer Prizewinner about a coldly selfish woman, who dominates her husband and cares only for the house that is a symbol of security, is still vivid theater. George Kelly, in his own way, is as relentless as Harriet Craig.

Most things date in some respect after almost a quarter of a century; but here it is much less the playwriting than the playwright. Kelly's approach to Mrs. Craig, beyond what it suggests of the oft-proclaimed "misogynist" in him, smacks strongly of the old-fashioned moralist. He seems more interested in punishing Harriet than in probing her motivation; he not only leaves her, at the end, forsaken and forlorn in the house she has turned into a hell, but he lets one character after another excoriate her. What Mr. Kelly fails to show, at least to the extent he should, is that along with something naturally hateful in Mrs. Craig there is something deeply sick. Her fanaticism about being secure is the measure of her fright about not being; she is a dangerous neurotic. One of the best things about Judith (Angel Street) Evelyn's excellent portrayal of the role is that she stresses the neuroticism.

For all its sharpness as theater--perhaps largely because of it--the play seems a little remote and unventilated, lacking the clank and ambiguity and vibration of real life. It is pretty much what Andre Gide said the French language was: a pianoforte without a pedal.

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