New Play in Manhattan

Red Roses for Me (by Sean O'Casey).

Not since Within the Gates in 1934 has Sean O'Casey had a "new" play produced on Broadway. Of those waiting without the gates, Red Roses scarcely deserves to be admitted first. It has much that is indi vidual, and at its best evokes the vernacular glories of Juno and the Paycock. But it is chiefly a reminder of how distinguished O'Casey can be; it has no sustained distinction of its own.

Written in 1942, when O'Casey was nearing 60, and loosely concerned with the Dublin transport workers' strike of 1913, Red Roses bears all the marks of his later, less realistic writing. The themes are the expected ones, but the orchestration is more mystical and ornate, the form more vagrant and diffuse. Though pivoting on a strike and an O'Casey-like young idealist (Kevin McCarthy) who is killed in it, the events, far from displaying any clear dramatic line, are never really dramatized at all. Garrulous minor characters outshine those involved in action, Dublin overshadows individual Dubliners, speech passes into song, movement into ballet. The tone, reflected in Howard Bay's graphic sets, is now harshly, now religiously lyrical.

Sometimes this is rewarding. Hymned, the workers' cause has less stridency than when harangued. And when O'Casey's outcast street figures raise their voices in a dream of fair Dublin, there is a sudden sense of a city's voice upraised. But things seem oftener picturesque than intense, and windy rather than Aeolian. The finest moments have the comic smack and grizzle of Juno. A trio of codgers snort and wrangle gloriously, and go right on snorting and wrangling while they crouch on the floor to avoid what may crash through the windows. When one old boy claims St. Patrick for a Protestant, when another argues evolution, because monkeys, like men, are fond of beer, everything starts coming alive, expands, grows vibrant.

Moreover, this reinforces the fact that O'Casey's true genius is comic, that his tragedy--save perhaps in The Plough and the Stars--verges on sentimentality or melodrama. It is laughter that really soars in Red Roses, not feeling or poetry. The verbal gifts are there. But too often they miss magic by striving for it, or seem almost to be spoofing the Irish love of words. But where Synge, in The Playboy, could spoof that love and in the very process make prose beautiful, a more reflective O'Casey mingles honest rhythms with gaudy ones, and sharp speech with fine writing. The play palpably bears his signature, but with too many loops and flourishes, and in purple ink.

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