New Play In Manhattan

I Am a Camera (by John van Druten) is an interesting stage piece though an unsatisfactory play. A pastiche of Christopher Isherwood's tales of Berlin in 1930--a decadent city already loud with Naziism--the play uses young Chris himself as a camera eye. But what counts most are the very candid camera shots of an English girl named Sally Bowles--a bad little good girl, strenuously bohemian, ostentatiously wanton, spotted with living without really having been touched by life. Julie (Member of the Wedding) Harris plays Sally brilliantly, with amazing verve, and with a naughty-child air saves her from seeming nastily tarnished.

Sally is the center of attention for a play that has no center itself. There is expressive writing, deft direction, some touching minor characters. But the camera cannot quite decide between an individual photograph and a group picture, a person and a place. Sally creates a sort of Green-Hatted Dream Girl, but her gaudy make-believe never really counterpoints the hoodlum realities of Berlin. And Chris, despite resolute note-taking and soliloquizing, seems much less a camera for events than a mere confidant for Sally. William Prince makes him seem any pleasant young man rather than a talented writer.

The play itself turns slackest toward the end: where there might be a more ominous light in the sky, a more urgent orchestration to the story, there are the merest stage doings about Sally's tweedy British mother. Though never dull, I Am a Camera suffers from too much of Sally's own live-in-the-moment disorder.

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