New Plays in Manhattan

Child of Fortune (by Guy Bolton) derives from one of the most spacious and complex of all Henry James's novels, The Wings of the Dove. That alone may explain why the most recent of James's stage adaptations--which like the best of them might also have been called The Heiress--is among the most unsatisfactory. It is not so much that Adapter Bolton has violated James's novel (although he has made a host of small changes that reduce the book's great cumulative impact to emotional small change); it is much more that by diminishing James's story to a mere tampered-with story line, by restricting James's characters, to the role of mere plot carriers, Bolton has burned away the gold of James's great moral drama to leave the period dross of his somewhat too-fictional tale.

The central situation--two worldly, hard-up people in love and secretly engaged, a doomed young heiress who is a friend of the girl's and in love with the man, the girl's idea that the man make the heiress happy by marrying her and simultaneously ensure their own happiness by becoming her heir--clearly lends itself to simple stage drama. But such a central situation comes only in very small or very large sizes; it can only succeed as something trashy or something tremendous. To tell the story in the theater, on James's own terms, is to face technical dilemmas and risk artistic betrayals as great as the ethical dilemmas and moral betrayals involving the characters. James's canvas, his outward world of London and Venice, is large, populous, resplendent. James's characters, his inner world of sensibilities, perceptions, perturbations, are studied in depth and projected at full length. And James's method is--triumphantly if sometimes tediously--one of peculiar indirection.

Child of Fortune, played out almost symbolically on two extremely shallow sets, has an almost glaring smallness of orbit and thinness of texture. Playwright Bolton has clearly tried to suggest James's ironies, intensities and cultural decor. But, as they seem all too inadequate for James's story, they seem almost superfluous to Bolton's. Cut to the bone, Child of Fortune lacks nourishment as well as distinction. And Producer Jed Harris, by badly miscasting the two conspirators, lost his last chance to give the play any power.

A Very Special Baby (by Robert Alan Aurthur) refers to a 34-year-old man--the youngest child (whose mother died when he was born) in a large Italian-American family. At once babied and belittled by a rich, tyrannical, self-made father who resents him because of his mother's death, he has never found his feet. When at last there seems a chance he will, the father blocks the way, and there are agitated scenes before the son presumably escapes.

Strongly acted, the play--which closed at week's end--had honesty of purpose, some good scenes and dialogue and, in the title character--admirably played by Jack Warden--a still untarnished stage type. But the play failed of any real urgency, fell short of any real distinction. Though its contents were overstretched, the trouble in the end was less thinness of material than drabness of method. Every season brings forth a similar naturalistic play or two, a respectable one-set, one-situation drama of small people intently studied, with problems or frustrations resolutely stressed. What seems crucially amiss is all lack of a personal pigmentation or signature, of the playwright's own enlarging vision of life. Hence the plays seek to vitalize their material, now with photographic detail, now with punch theater. But in the one case there ensues no real reverberation--the loud pedal has been substituted for the resonant chord. And in the other case, there develops no real sense of dimension--a mere closeup has been substituted for a view.

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