New Plays in Manhattan

The Young and Beautiful (by Sally Benson). Laid in Chicago in 1915, this stage blend of Scott Fitzgerald stories concerns a teen-age beauty who seems, in her blase posturings, an early Jazz-Age young thing. She yearns for the perfect love, and in the search for it no sooner conquers suitors than she brusquely casts them aside. At last she meets and wins the perfect lover (James Olson), but there follows neither romantic lightning nor satiric laughter. There is rather the chill discovery that even now she cannot respond, that the seeker of a grand passion is incapable of any passion, and all her swains have been burnt by lack of fire.

Whether altogether frigid or partly immature, ruthlessly self-centered Josephine Perry is interesting to watch in a play that begins like another romp about a junior miss up to junior mischief, only to grow steadily more sober in tone. As Josephine, Lois Smith has the right looks and essential right talent, but works with too few and too showy gestures. And the storytelling is often unflexed and even languid. But along with entertainment value in its lighter moments, The Young and Beautiful has shock value and a pinch of substance at the end.

A Day by the Sea (by N. C. Hunter) was a success in London, where the cast--including Sir John Gielgud, Sir Ralph Richardson, Dame Sybil Thorndike and Irene Worth--was dazzling. On Broadway, where the cast is merely good, the play's chances seem slighter. A prettily draped Dorsetshire study of has-beens and never-weres, a Chekhov-flavored and slightly watery custard, A Day by the Sea is often nicely written, sometimes neatly observed. But it shows no very personal talent or original insight.

The characters are so many musical instruments for a rather sophisticated but monotonously scored tone poem. There is a mother (Aline MacMahon) who is pleasantly, parochially country-housish; her once-vigorous brother-in-law who is now just terribly old; her overserious, not very human son (Hume Cronyn), a civil servant who has lost out on the girl who loved him and is losing out on a career. There is the girl herself (Jessica Tandy), now a middle-aging widow who loves him no longer. Devoid of pasts or futures or both, the characters are drowning with the utmost politeness; it is sometimes hard, in fact, to distinguish desperation in them from mere lassitude.

The play has its bubbles of English humor. As the half-dead old man, Halliwell Hobbes brings particular life to his part, and Dennis King is bright, if a little broad, as a bitter doctor. Most of the other characters are more brooding in their lostness, but they fumble and philosophize, care or cease to care, without much individuality. Had there never been a Chekhov, A Day by the Sea might provide a rather welcome breath of fresh-airlessness. As it is, the effect seems both too faint and too familiar.

A View from the Bridge (by Arthur Miller) is a double bill--two long one-acters about life at opposite ends of the Brooklyn Bridge. The two are much farther apart in mood and merit than they are in locale. The Manhattan play, A Memory of Two Mondays, is a pat, shapeless picture of life in a warehouse during the Depression; the title play is a forceful drama about a decent man who is undone by blind passion and self-ignorance.

A View from the Bridge concerns Eddie Carbone, a kindly longshoreman who has brought up his wife's orphan niece (Gloria Marlowe) with his own family. All goes well until he takes into his home two Sicilian cousins who have entered the U.S. illegally. The niece and one of the cousins (Richard Davalos)--a blond youth who likes to sing and cook--fall in love. Eddie's intense, unrealized sexual feeling for the niece drives him to jealous rancors. He taunts the girl that the boy seeks marriage only as a way of gaining citizenship; he tries to make the neighborhood think the boy is a homosexual. Still thwarted, he blabs about the cousins' illegal entry to the immigration officers, and in a final rage draws a knife in a fight that results in his own death.

With suggestions of ancient Greece in Boris Aronson's fine setting, with the neighborhood lawyer (J. Carrol Naish) acting as Greek chorus and talking poetically of the Greek and Sicilian past, A View plainly seeks to evoke the drama's great first home of guilty passion and fatal ignorance. But the play, in all this, only emphasizes how little its peasant psychology and hot Sicilian natures have in common with highborn Greek tragedy. Only now and then does there jut up the fated blundering of life, and the pity of it. Far oftener it seems no Furies' shears that slit, but the vendetta's dagger, not prideful man that falls, but tormented beast.

Though lacking sharpness, A View is for most of the way powerful and tense. Only near the end do things slacken, so that the play concludes with no great tragic impact. This may partly lie in Van Heflin, who, playing a character that Miller made more obsession than man, is wanting, for all his competence, in Italian nature and intensity.

More than good theater at its best, the play is not quite good drama as a whole. But it strongly bears Miller's signature, whereas A Memory of Two Mondays--making stage types of factory types, and naturalism an excuse for plotlessness--could be in almost anyone's handwriting.

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