New Plays in Manhattan

Oh, Men! Oh, Women! (by Edward Chodorov) is an engaging comedy about the love affair between a middle-aged psychoanalyst (Franchot Tone) and a Freudian slip of a girl (Betsy von Furstenberg). On his wedding eve, Tone is disconcerted to learn from a new patient that his bride-to-be has a lurid past. A second patient, Anne Jackson, reveals that her embittered movie-star husband has decided to seduce Tone's fiancee to see if the analyst "can take it as well as dish it out."

Fortunately, Playwright Chodorov* peoples his play with characters who are every bit as zany on their feet as they are woebegone on the analyst's couch. He has written some very funny lines ("The reason men and women can't get along is because they each want something completely different--the men want women, and the women want men") and invented, as well as borrowed, quite a lot of amusing stage business. Betsy von Furstenberg shines as the amoral Eve who wants to settle down without settling up; Hollywood's Gig Young persuasively proves that the breakdown of modern society began with Ibsen's A Doll's House, and Franchot Tone--though cut from pure theatrical cardboard--nevertheless acts with sufficient weight to hold the farce in place on the stage.

Handsomely mounted by William and Jean Eckart, the play is directed by its author with the same smooth competence shown in his script. Using a series of set pieces rather than a plot, Chodorov seldom penetrates very deeply into the causes of the war between the sexes, but he does illuminate, with good will as well as good humor, one of the minor skirmishes along that worldwide front line.

The Prescott Proposals (by Howard Lindsay & Russel Grouse) has a highly topical setting, one that is far more modern than its plot. Treating of the U.N.--and of Katharine Cornell as a U.S. delegate with proposals for enlarging "areas of agreement" between nations--the play fitfully eyes a serious theme. But it is oftener a mere yarn that suspends seriousness in favor of suspense. The U.N.'s Czech delegate, who in happier days had been Delegate Cornell's lover, calls, out of confused personal emotions, at her house and promptly dies of a heart attack. Were the fact to leak out, the repercussions might wreck the Prescott Proposals.

There is, accordingly, the classic problem of how to get rid of a corpse; and thereafter, bites of U.N. thinking are washed down with draughts of unabashed theater. Only at the end do plot and theme rather floridly meet--when the Russian delegate, despite his Communist conditioning, shows a human spark. That human spark, deep inside even Communists, is what Delegate Cornell feels can eventually save the world.

In State of the Union, Lindsay & Grouse once brightly mated politics and humor; they have been less successful matchmakers with politics and thrills. They have staunch allies in Actress Cornell and an able cast--including Felix Aylmer as the British delegate; they start off with a genuinely promising first act. After that, things tend to halt at times, and at others to go downhill. The play's serious side, too solemn for a suspense yarn, is too superficial for anything else. To keep really alive, the play should have clung like a leech to its corpse.

* Playwright Edward (Wonder Boy, Kind Lady, Decision) Chodorov, 49, is often confused with his brother, Playwright Jerome (My Sister Eileen, Junior Miss, Wonderful Town) Chodorov, 42.

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