New Plays in Manhattan

Tonight in Samarkand (by Jacques Deval and Lorenzo Semple Jr.) takes its theme from the famous Oriental legend--about the inevitability of fate--that also suggested John O'Hara's Appointment in Samarra. The doom-dodger in this some--what Oriental tale of French circus life is a much-besought tamer of tigers (Jan Farrand), who, fearing the future, gazes into the crystal ball of the magician (Louis Jourdan). In two flash-forwards, the ball reveals that on her next birthday --whether she marries a juggler or a millionaire--she must perish in a steamship disaster. Finally, because his own future is the one thing the ball lacks the power to foretell, she marries the magician, who adores her.

Had there never been a philosophy of kismet, doubtless the theater would have invented one. For whatever its status as metaphysics, it makes a useful handmaiden for melodrama. And exploited, as in Tonight in Samarkand, with all the blare of circus music and color of circus life, it achieves for two acts a certain quality of nice old-fashioned excitement. The play goes in for few philosophic frills, merely uses fate as a plot gimmick. A blonde girl symbolizes death, but no more abstrusely than a headwaiter symbolizes dinner.

The play, however, partly from possessing no deeper values, partly from having its outcome foreordained, in time starts dragging its feet. A third stanza of Have a Rendezvous with Death seems excessive particularly as the chink in the final marriage's armor against fate is pretty easy to spot. For a lady who keeps late-dating doom, two earlier-in-the-evening admirers are quite enough.

The Wayward Saint (by Paul Vincent Carroll) is a St. Francis-like Irish canon, who--to his own and his bishop's distress --gets a name for sainthood thrust upon him. His noticeable talents for talking to birds, healing children and making plums grow on cherry trees have forced the bishop to banish him to a remote country parish. There, in the form of a worldly baron, appears an emissary of the Devil, panting after such a trophy as the soul of a saint. Under the baron's prodding, the canon begins to think he really is a saint, starts meddling in lives and dabbling in miracles, and soon commits some serious clerical errors. Only in the nick of time is he saved from Hell and restored to his former humility.

The Wayward Saint has the materials for a delicate satiric fantasy; in spots it boasts nice, imaginative touches and humorous lines, and in Irish Actor Liam Redmond it has an expertly lovable canon.

But the play falls flat. To begin with, a decidedly lightweight script has been cursed with ponderous staging. But the script itself is oftener cute than genuinely perky, and it is rich in events that are extraordinary without being interesting.

The author of Shadow and Substance and The White Steed, rather than showing his old mettle with the Irish tongue, offers mere bits of verbal Irish lace. Some fairly standard jokes about the Irish and the clergy take on almost the character of leitmotivs. Even most of the characters fail to come off--including Paul Lukas as the baron. There the play does not give the Devil his due: the one thing an emissary of his would most certainly not be is a crashing bore.

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