New Play in Manhattan

The Wisteria Trees (by Joshua Logan; based on Anton Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard; produced by Mr. Logan & Leland Hayward) converts Chekhov's 19th Century Russian landowners into turn-of-the-century Louisiana gentlefolk. Thereafter there are perhaps as many subtle differences between The Wisteria Trees and The Cherry Orchard as there are obvious resemblances. The difference that matters most: The Wisteria Trees is immeasurably inferior.

In Louisiana as in Russia the play concerns a dying class of charming, weak, self indulgent aristocrats who stubbornly refuse to face reality, and the emerging power of plebeian gogetters. Playwright Logan's most vivid achievement is atmospheric: with Negro servants and songs, with Jo Mielziner's handsome set and Lucinda Ballard's elegant costumes, The Wisteria Trees has its own strong sense of period and place. And in Louisiana as in Russia, the family will not sell off some of the land they love in order to survive, so that in the end their plantation goes under the hammer, their wisteria vines under the ax.

Playwright Logan's Lucy Andree Rans-dall is turned into a rather more aware heroine, and amorously lost lady, than Chekhov's Madame Ranevskaya. Helen Hayes plays the part with resourcefulness and brightness, and serves (more than anything in the play) as a kind of handrail through the evening. For Logan has not learned Chekhov's trick of creating drama by evading it, has not his ability to seem at once compassionate and inexorable.

The play is also paced so slowly as to seem not leisurely but monotonous. And its texture turns curiously coarse at times, its curtains much too emphatic. Yancy Loper, the conquering parvenu, is conventionalized into an ardent suitor for Lucy's hand; while the profoundly Chekhovian ending, with the old servant thoughtlessly locked up in the deserted house, was dropped during the tryout because audiences seemed "angered" by it.

The truth is that Playwright Logan has infused a touch of Yancy Loper into Chekhov, and what is heard at the end is the sound of the ax hacking the heart out of The Cherry Orchard. Yet the real trouble with The Wisteria Trees is not that it falls short of Chekhov, but that on its own terms it is so frequently blurred and limp.

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