New Plays in Manhattan

The Diary of Anne Frank (dramatized by Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett) does well with a difficult assignment, achieves through quiet sensibility what could be wrecked by staginess. From young Anne Frank's real-life chronicle of herself and seven other Jews hiding out during the Nazi occupation in an Amsterdam garret (TIME, June 16, 1952) have come vivid stage pictures of their huddled, muffled, weirdly commingled existence. It was an existence fated to end in Nazi concentration camps and death, but for the two years it lasted, it proved a fascinating mixture of the brightly ordinary and the hideously abnormal, of all-too-human squabbles and all-but-superhuman control, of comic faultfinding and heroic adjustment, of people at once transformed and quite untouched.

The play is at much its best in portraying the group life and the general problem, in such special circumstances, of two families living under one roof. Neither in the sudden moments of midnight terror nor in the explosions of cramped boardinghouse farce is there any prettifying. If Anne's father (beautifully played by Joseph Schildkraut) is disciplined and quiet, her mother can be excitable; Dussel the dentist is fussy, Mr. Van Daan greedy. Under Garson Kanin's skillful direction, there is no more of an attempt at heartbreaking gaiety than at lurid gloom; there is chiefly a day-by-day liveliness, a gradual learning to walk--and on tiptoe--among eggs.

With Anne's own brattish or girlish part in the group, the play also succeeds. In her more personal scenes, where a secret self must be made vocal and visual, she sometimes falls short. There is nothing so private as a diary or so public as a stage, and the two, at times, refuse to dovetail. Again, certain loudspeakered diary passages take on the tone of bulletins. But a play that very largely succeeds with its material everywhere respects it, and in her limelighted Broadway debut, 17-year-old Susan Strasberg plays Anne with obvious talent and much animation and appeal.

Manhattan critics, hailing the birth of a new star, called Susan Strasberg "enchanting," "radiant" and "breathtaking." A high-school senior at Professional Children's School, Susie stands 5 ft., weighs 96 Ibs. No theatrical novice, she began her career at 14 in an off-Broadway production. She played Juliet on TV when she was only 15, and has already appeared in two movies, The Cobweb and the forthcoming Picnic. Though she was swamped with movie offers after opening night, she will not do another one until next summer.

Susie's mother is Actress Paula Miller, a knowledgeable guide ("Susie didn't start studying till she was 14 because I loathe child acting"). Her father is Director Lee Strasberg, cofounder of the Group Theater, director of the Actors' Studio, leading U.S. exponent of the Stanislavsky ("live the role") method of acting. He has helped develop many stars, e.g., Marlon Brando, Kim Hunter, Julie Harris, claims that one of his current students, Marilyn Monroe, will some day amaze skeptics with her dramatic range. Daughter Susie got little formal help from him ("I don't take students younger than 18"), surprised him with her theatrical know-how when he saw the out-of-town tryout. Says Susie: "I'd been picking things up from him by osmosis."

Tiger at the Gates (translated from the French of Jean Giraudoux by Christopher Fry) brought early distinction to the 1955-56 season. Just how good an orthodox play is this sunburst of dialectics and wit may be open to question; beyond question the play exhibits the elegance, the light-fingered thoughtfulness, the ironic lyricism of the most civilized playwright of the era between the wars. And Christopher Fry's translation not only does brilliantly by the play but may even be Fry's solidest writing for the theater.

The play's French title is The Trojan War Will Not Take Place, and it is Trojan Hector's fierce and fruitless effort to make good this claim that constitutes Giraudoux's action. Troy's greatest warrior, Hector (well played by Michael Redgrave), comes home to find his brother Paris home ahead of him, with Helen. Hector is determined to return Helen to Menelaus, King of Sparta, and so avoid war; nor is the assured, shallow, minxlike Helen (amusingly played by Diane Cilento) the obstacle. The real obstacles are Troy's idealists, who particularly idealize war; its elderly poets, who love celebrating young men's deaths; its common people, who are spoiling for a fight; its international lawyers, for whom a legalistic victory is well worth an international cataclysm. Finding Troy useless, Hector turns to Greece, to the worldly-wise Ulysses (played impeccably by Walter Fitzgerald). Though thinking wars unpreventable, Ulysses vows this time to prevent one. But a warmongering poet whom Hector angrily throttles cries out that Greek Ajax has throttled him; Ajax is mauled by Trojans; and Giraudoux's story passes over into Homer's.

Though it ultimately achieves a kind of wry grandeur, the play does so on its own ironic rather than on any customary dramatic turns. Tiger displays a charming loquacity, a dawdling relentlessness. Helen must chatter and Hecuba sniff, and there are little vaudevilles on the difficulty of cursing well, little broadsides on a bard's-eye view of war. If in some sense a protest against war, the play is much more a lament for war's seeming inevitability. Like all masters of humane irony, all practitioners of philosophic high comedy, Giraudoux pierces to a tragic fundamental, to a world never long enough governed by logic, or spurred on by truth, or saved by virtue. His own dazzling speeches, moreover, ram home how inflammatory or mendacious words can be.

As between such differing masters of dialectics and irony, there is something poignant and lyrical (because more pessimistic) in Giraudoux that is not found in Shaw. Yet here the two men touch, for Shaw wrote a kind of Tiger at the Gates in Caesar and Cleopatra. Each man saw worlds about to overturn through a queen's lure; in Shaw's Caesar as in Giraudoux's Hector, the great warrior is the great hater of war; in Shaw's Caesar as in Giraudoux's Ulysses, the wise man sadly grasps the impotence of wisdom. And both plays are as autumnal in their ruefulness as they remain vernal in their wit.

The Wooden Dish (by Edmund Morris) tackles an always real situation without much sense of reality. It concerns an old man who has long lived, unwanted, with his son and daughter-in-law and who now, half blind, breaks dishes and sets things on fire. The daughter-in-law threatens to leave the house if Pop is not sent to a "home." Here the play starts to bounce away from its theme: the daughter-in-law begs the boarder to run off with her; the teen-age granddaughter theatrically intervenes. In time, the old man sets forth gallantly for the rest home.

The play has its moments. But besides going all around the mulberry bush, it offers too much routine sentiment and commonplace writing. The evening's one great asset is Louis Calhern's fine playing of the tangy, once powerful, still dignified old man.

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