New Plays in Manhattan

The Teahouse of the August Moon (adapted by John Patrick from the novel by Vern Sneider) has roughly the same locale as Mister Roberts and South Pacific and should have roughly the same success. The play has all the virtues of a big popular hit and not too many of the usual drawbacks. In treating of an occupation officer's experiences in an Okinawa village, Playwright Patrick has chosen a warm comedy level and stuck to it. Perhaps more crucially, Playwright Patrick, helped by able Director Robert Lewis and Scene Designer Peter Larkin, has created throughout an artificial, fairy-tale mood. Hence, though East is East and West is West, the twain meet and get along fine--for the good reason that an even more hostile twain, reality and make-believe, stay miles apart.

Captain Fisby (John Forsythe) is sent to the village of Tobiki with orders to teach the natives democracy and to build them a pentagon-shaped schoolhouse. He brilliantly bungles his assignment: rather than march them glumly in formation toward their desired goal, he lets them mosey to it down their own primrose path. They wax prosperous selling sweet-potato brandy to the U.S. armed forces; they grow affectionate when allowed to build a teahouse instead of a school. There is not only joy in Tobiki, but, at the final curtain, notable satisfaction in Washington. A genial satire, the play blueprints the superiority of the human heart over the military mind.

The prettiest scenes are those between Fisby and the uniformly lovable natives, who first offer him gifts and finally devo tion. The funniest scenes are those between Fisby and his hidebound, befuddled blockhead of a colonel (well played by Paul Ford). The most individual scenes are those in which David Wayne, as a native interpreter full of peasant wisdom, comes engagingly before the curtain and comments on the story.

By keeping entirely to surfaces, a play that strives after popular appeal is never compelled to make compromises. Even so, the writing sometimes fails it: before the story gathers momentum, it often seems more cute than droll, more hack-professional than peasantlike. It is not until the teahouse is building that the captain and the colonel are sufficiently at odds to become hilarious. And it is not until the teahouse is built, and there is music and graceful Mariko Niki's geisha dance, that the play takes on its tinkly charm. But by keeping its best foot backward, The Teahouse ends on just the right note of wistful gaiety.

Late Love (by Rosemary Casey) pictures a household apparently bullied by a puritanical old dowager, but actually kept in chains by her priggish novelist son. It tells how a lady painter arrives to paint the master's portrait and stays on to set his people free.

That the prig is incredible--is, in fact, a mere setup for the action--matters less than that everyone else is so nice. Never were people more aggressively charming, genteelly rowdy or sweetly romantic (for Late Love has more than its share of early love). Arlene Francis and Lucile Watson do what they can to enliven things; but the play is for those who take their tea very weak, and with three lumps of sugar.

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