New Plays in Manhattan

Command Decision (by William Wister Haines; produced by Kermit Bloomgarden) had several critics waist-deep in adjectives and recalling What Price Glory? Long hopeful of a good drama about World War II, they were partly confusing the quality of the drink with the intensity of their thirst. But no one could question that in Command Decision World War II had finally inspired an effective play.

Command Decision is focused on the less happy, indeed the downright harrowing, aspects of authority. As Brigadier General K. C. Dennis of the Air Forces (ably played by Paul Kelly) sees it, unless the jet-plane factories deep inside the Reich are swiftly destroyed, jets will soon cover the sky and immeasurably prolong the war. So, day after day, he orders the bombing of those factories, though his losses are appalling and the thought of the losses tears him apart.

To the world he becomes a heartless butcher, a quick target for civilian public opinion, a perfect scapegoat for the Pentagon's brass hats, easy prey for congressional busybodies making overseas inspection tours. No pleas, no threats will budge Dennis: he is as adamantine of mind as he is agonized of soul. Eventually he is relieved of his command. But at the very end, his successor is won over to his policy.

Command Decision is hard-hitting theater, full of mailed conflict and scrappy talk. What it hits hardest, however, is all sentimental attitudes toward war, all evasions of how damnable it can be, all attempts to break it up neatly into so many parts hell and so many parts humanitarianism. But there is nothing doctrinaire or diagrammatic about the play. Playwright Haines (himself an Air Forces veteran) writes something that could easily have happened; and his characters are people, not mere points of view.

The play has its faults (it lags and sags and sprawls a bit), and its limitations--it is less a play than a show, with a show's quick turnover of impact and emotion. But it is a show well worth seeing.

The Heiress (adapted from Henry James's Washington Square by Ruth & Augustus Goetz; produced by Fred F. Finklehoffe) turns a well-nigh perfect novel into a very imperfect but highly interesting drama. That is no trifling feat, for the novel is not very dramatic. Mr. & Mrs. Goetz give the story more kick by settling for less art. At their worst, they are not so much collaborating with Henry James as colliding with him; but on the whole they do a good job. Famed Director Jed Harris (Broadway, The Front Page, Our Town) does a better one.

The Heiress*--a period play of mid-19th Century Manhattan--centers in Catherine Sloper (strikingly played by Britain's Wendy Hiller), an awkward, passive, plain-looking girl with great expectations. She falls passionately in love with an attractive fortune hunter (well played by Peter Cookson); but her coldhearted, sardonic father (well played by Basil Rathbone), thoroughly aware of the suitor's motives and utterly unconcerned with his daughter's feelings, forbids the match on pain of disinheritance.

Straightway Catherine's fiance jilts her. Later, after her father has died and Catherine is a rich old maid, the suitor comes to propose once more. Catherine once more accepts him. But she has grown rancorous and hard, and having raised all his hopes, melodramatically jilts him in turn.

The whole play moves skillfully, on well-oiled hinges; and the first half seldom violates the dry, ironic tone of the book. But the story James was telling--of worldlings shattering a not very articulate, not very engaging, not very interesting, and yet fully sentient and decent human life--is gradually converted into something more theatrical and less true. The end of The Heiress is decidedly vivid, but it annihilates character for plot. James's whole point about Catherine is that she is a wren; Broadway suddenly transforms her into a kite.

Broadway has seen British-born Wendy Hiller only once before--in Love on the Dole, a slight British comedy about the depression that ran for four months in 1936. She has made only three movies, but they were good enough to make a deep impression on U.S. moviegoers.

Now 35 and the mother of two children, Actress Hiller owes her start to Bernard Shaw himself, who saw Love on the Dole in London and invited her to play Saint Joan at the Malvern Festival. After complaining about her hairdo, G.B.S. asked her to do the movie versions of his Pygmalion and Major Barbara. Her third film is the current I Know Where I'm Going (TIME, Sept. 15).

For a decade Miss Hiller has been politely turning down offers from British and U.S. film producers. Now she will undoubtedly have to reject several dozen more. "They all wanted me to sign long-term contracts," she says sweetly. "After all, I'm not a film actress." If she does any movie at all, it may well be The Heiress with Producer Finklehoffe (who hails from Hollywood) and Director Harris.

* The novel Henry James called Washington Square reached Broadway as The Heiress; Henry James's The Sense of the Past reached Broad way as Berkeley Square.

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