New Play in Manhattan

Summer of the 17th Doll (by Ray Lawler) reached Broadway, after something of a triumph in London, from its native Australia. As Broadway's first newsworthy Australian play in history, it has its piquant side--plenty of local color, a working-class lingo, accents faithfully rendered by an all-Australian cast. As altogether honest work, it treats understandingly of believable people and of an odd patterning of human lives. But neither a fresh background nor a sound theme can give the play sufficient dramatic pressure or verbal leverage; if there are no false notes to the writing, there are no resonances or overtones either.

The play tells of two sugar-cane field workers (Kenneth Warren and Playwright Lawler), the one a Samson at his job, the other a Don Juan with the women. For 16 summers, during the long layoff period, they have come to Melbourne for a home-style spree with two barmaids. Each year one of them has given his girl a Kewpie doll, by now a symbol of gaily recurrent romance and absentee devotion. This 17th summer, with the other girl married and a new one (Madge Ryan) in her place, with relations between the two men rather strained, and with various flare-ups and intrusions, all the fun fizzles out; the show goes bust. In truth, the revelers are has-beens, the one in brawn, the other in lure; their revels now are ended.

The last act sharply drives home with what deceiving colors and in what a doll-house world they have staged their summer frisks. It drives home, too, their refusal, even with the dollhouse in collapse, to part with their illusions. The demonstration rings true, but Playwright Lawler has really had to take the audience by the hand and lead it up to the truth; somehow it has not the weight of the play behind it. Too many earlier scenes were flattish, too much writing was prosy; nowhere did 17 years leap out in a sudden glance, or a lifetime emerge in a comment. The play makes soberly clear the sad human arithmetic that twice two is four, and that mankind would make it five. What is beyond it is the magical creative arithmetic that can raise things to a higher power.

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