New Play in Manhattan

Detective Story (by Sidney Kingsley; produced by Howard Lindsay & Russel Grouse) does a full-color job on life in a Manhattan police station. Laid in the detective squad room, it bristles with movement and crackles with drama, is by turns grim and grotesque, touching and horrifying. Around the edges hover wacky complainants and befuddled minor offenders; farther inside, matters are darker, bloodier, more tragic.

In the very center of the picture is Detective Jim McLeod (excellently played by Ralph Bellamy). Because he had a sadistic father, he has become relentlessly uncharitable as well as rigidly just toward all evildoers. His only real tenderness is for his wife (Meg Mundy); and suddenly, in the midst of hounding an abortionist, he discovers that his wife went to the man before she was married. The psychological tangle that results is too much for both McLeod and Playwright Kingsley; the solution, like the whole setup, is far more lurid than convincing.

Detective Story is much the same brand of documentary melodrama as Kingsley's Dead End and Men in White. Wherever it can, the play lets truth walk side by side with good theater, but in a pinch it is always theater that has right of way. Among other things, Detective Story pleads that mercy should season justice. But too often it lets hokum season realism, and raises salient questions only to provide inconclusive answers.

But whatever its merits as a slice of life, it is a nice fat slice of liveliness--one that recalls the era and atmosphere of The Front Page. It is paced for excitement and punctuated with humor, and it offers a small army of well-etched and well-acted minor characters. Like a certain style of pianist, Kingsley keeps hitting wrong notes and is much too fond of pedal; but he bangs out a spirited tune.

Stocky, easygoing Playwright-Director Sidney Kingsley, 42, is a slow worker. He tears up nine-tenths of what he writes, and writes nothing until he has documented it with a sociologist's researching zeal.

On Detective Story, his sixth play and the first since 1943, he worked for two years, haunting a Manhattan detective squad room, the District Attorney's office, judges' chambers. For a month he was on 24-hour-call with the Homicide Squad. The research finally got so rich that Kingsley went off to the country and wrote the play without looking at his notes. But, at a rehearsal, some 60 detectives seemed pleased with the results.

New Yorker Kingsley, who married Actress Madge Evans in 1939, set out to write plays while still at Cornell. He spent three years, much of it living with interns, on his first play, Men in White ("That was a longie"). It won the 1933 Pulitzer Prize. Then, in the same blend of melodrama and social conscience, came Dead End (1935), Ten Million Ghosts (1936), The World We Make (1939).

Kingsley finished The Patriots, 1943's Drama Critics Circle award winner, during his four years in the Army (private to lieutenant), but he was broke when he got out. He fixed that by working on a couple of scripts for M-G-M (Homecoming and Cass Timberlane), then plunged into Detective Story.

As "a sort of memorial," he plans to do his next play about his mother, who died recently. His friends supposed that here, finally, was a subject that would need no research. But Kingsley is running true to form: "My mother was a very proud and mysterious person. There's a lot I don't know about her. I'm going to have to do a little detective work."

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