New Plays in Manhattan

The Happiest Millionaire was Philadelphia's Anthony J. Drexel Biddle (1874-1948). Kyle Crichton, who helped write My Philadelphia Father with Biddle's daughter Cordelia, has rerouted the biography for the stage. Certainly this most redblooded of bluebloods, most warm-hearted of hotheads, most brotherly-loving of eccentrics--who turned teetotaler and collected alligators, boxed with professionals and gave a voice recital without having a voice--cried out to be a stage character. The stage problem, plainly enough, was to give some sort of connection to Father's disconnected crazes and sudden whims; the stage difficulty was to make a negotiable narrative from a lot of anecdotal small change.

In the attempt, My Philadelphia Father got pommeled and knocked about like one of Biddle's sparring partners, and Biddle himself at times got kept out of sight in his corner. The whole play takes place in 1916-17, and the stage action centers on Cordelia's engagement and marriage to Tobacco Heir Angier Duke. Angier, seemingly a weak and timid mouse, slowly emerges as a tough little rooster with a mind--and a body--of his own. And Angier's sharp-tongued Southern mother seems at times less like a North Carolina Duke than an Alabama Bankhead.

There are a good many moments when Father or fisticuffs, Angier or Mrs. Duke make life at 2104 Walnut Street fun. In the title role, Walter Pidgeon seems an authentic enough Biddle, though perhaps not an eccentric enough Anthony J., and George Grizzard proves an engaging Angier. But there are a good many moments when Philadelphia might as well be Kansas City, when the Biddle clan might as well be cardboard, when there is no elegance or stuffiness to point up Father's antics, and when, accordingly, there is very little fun to the show. What has too often happened is that a truly unconventional kind of man has been exploited for an utterly conventional kind of farce. For most of what takes place, The Happiest Millionaire did not need an Anthony J. Drexel Biddle; it needed only a farce mixmaster like George Abbott. Frequently, for that matter, it still does.

Girls of Summer (by N. Richard Nash) concerns five people in Manhattan who inhabit or run in and out of a bohemian garden apartment. There is a mixed-up woman of 30 (Shelley Winters), her mixed-up 18-year-old sister, a mixed-up male teacher of ballet, the sister's mixed-up young hipster admirer, and a brash, cocky intruder who drives a Jaguar, sneers at art, and gets involved with both sisters. Soon Playwright Nash, converting two pair into a full house, makes plain that the stranger is mixed up too.

The result is some of the most unquiet desperation of the past few seasons. Possibly Playwright Nash, who showed plenty of humor in The Rainmaker and has glints of it here, intended something more relaxed. If so, his failure lies partly in an ill-wrought play, partly in an overwrought production. Barring the loudmouthed stranger (well-played by Pat Hingle), who for a time is invigorating, the characters do little more than suffer from upset psyches or indulge in the sexual miseries. Each revealing scene is repeated, with variations, two or three times, and betweenwhiles a neighborhood trumpeter steadily caterwauls offstage. All this not only destroys sympathy for the characters; it diminishes interest in the play. And Jack Garfein seems to have staged it as though it were a morality play with each of the characters representing Suffering.

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