New Plays in Manhattan

The Traitor (by Herman Wouk; produced by Jed Harris) turns something very much in the news into something very much of the theater. It concerns Professor Allen Carr (Wesley Addy), a brilliant young atomic scientist who feels that the only hope for peace is for the U.S. to share its atomic secrets with the U.S.S.R. Then, reasons the professor, war would prove annihilating for both sides. Carr has begun to pass information along to Communist agents when a U.S. Naval Intelligence squad catches him redhanded. Instead of arresting him as a traitor, they successfully appeal to him as a patriot. He helps them, at the cost of his life, to land a key Soviet spy.

Once it really starts moving, The Traitor is a tense piece of theater, paced and sharpened in Jed Harris' best Broadway manner. It is a vivid spy melodrama in which everything seems a little more ominous for being so much of the moment. It refurbishes old situations with such new gadgets as Geiger counters; it endows standard roles with new wrinkles. The Russian spy (suavely played by John Wengraf) is a cynical worldling whose motive is money, not Marx; the chief intelligence officer (winningly played by Lee Tracy) is a humorously rueful fellow who has a horror of muffing his assignment.

The timely subject matter adds interest rather than importance to the play. The Traitor has its serious side: there is some intelligent discussion, and even, in the person of Walter Hampden, a probing professor of philosophy. But as it proceeds, the play becomes more & more a stock thriller, until the tricks of the traitors become indistinguishable from tricks of the trade. Playwright Wouk does little to plumb the presumably complex mind of his young scientist. After giving every indication that Carr is to be the center of a serious drama, the author makes him little more than an instrument of the plot.

The Biggest Thief in Town (by Dalton Trumbo; produced by Lee Sabinson) sets out to make a gay evening of a ghoulish subject. The scene is an undertaking parlor in a small Colorado town. When the rich man of the town is proclaimed dead, the undertaker, being broke, is at first resigned to the fact that the costly funeral will go to a firm in Denver. Then, being drunk, he blithely kidnaps the corpse. This is merely the start of the festivities, which really get going when it turns out in the second act that the dead man is not quite dead.

Doubtless all this might be funny (after all, there was Arsenic and Old Lace). But it isn't. And it is all the less funny because it tries so hard to be. It is crudely and noisily staged, gives up satire for slapstick, proves even more alcoholic than macabre. It owes its few real laughs to what Thomas Mitchell, as the undertaker, does with his facial muscles and his vocal cords.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.