New Plays on Broadway

The Highest Tree (by Dore Schary) is a disaster of good intentions. The author of Sunrise at Campobello is writing in protest: he is one of the people who, aware of the danger of strontium 90 in the air, would ban further nuclear test explosions. Playwright Schary's central figure, Dr. Aaron Cornish (Kenneth MacKenna) is a famous atomic scientist stricken, very possibly because of his nuclear activities, with acute leukemia. In any case, after self-searching, he determines to spend what months remain to him urging an end to nuclear-bomb tests.

The doomed Aaron Cornish spends a great deal of time conferring with his doctor and arguing the dangers of nuclear testing with a contrary-minded colleague. Most of this, if remarkably dull, can at least be called relevant. But a far greater part of the time, Dr. Cornish is being visited by relatives: a son and a daughter-in-law, a brother and a sister-in-law, a sister and a brother-in-law, a nephew and a niece. In they come with their little domestic problems, and out they go; back they come with their headaches or their beatnik poets, and out they go again. Seldom has there been so little action in a play, so many needless people, or such endless talk. But the worst trouble with The Highest Tree is not that it is all talk, but that it is never talk; it is a flow of stilted professorial speech, of editorial-writer rhetoric. "That's not our unilateral decision!" a character announces. His house, Dr. Cornish remarks, "is laminated with years."

No better are the sentimental exchanges between Dr. Cornish and the young woman he loves. As his own director, Playwright Schary has only stressed what seems wooden or hammy. In neither capacity is he aware that there is an art to preaching, or that those who plead a cause should themselves seem human.

The Tenth Man (by Paddy Chayefsky) is something not too frequent in the theater: a genuine theater piece. It at once draws on life and departs from it, and by means of visual and atmospheric effects, of fantasy laced with reality, of prayers interrupted with jokes, it creates its own heightened world. Part of Playwright Chayefsky's purpose in doing this is to cast light on the world of reality, to set up symbolisms, set speculation going. At this more complex level, The Tenth Man fails. But as a theater piece, well staged by Tyrone Guthrie and often well acted, it is both striking and enjoyable.

The scene is a shabby Orthodox Jewish synagogue in Mineola, L.I., and the tenth man is a young lawyer with no faith in religion, or even in life itself, who has been brought in off the street to make a quorum for morning prayers. Except for an aged rabbi, even the elderly Jews who show up largely lack faith; they come out of habit or boredom, or as to a club where they can gossip and wisecrack and argue various isms. One of them brings his 18-year-old granddaughter, a schizophrenic who has been in and out of asylums and who, he thinks, is possessed of a dybbuk or evil spirit that must be exorcised. Amid prayer and prattle, amid the girl's infatuation for the young lawyer, the young lawyer's involvement with his analyst, the old rabbi's rapt communings with his God, the synagogue prepares for the exorcism ceremony. In the rather confusing midst of the ceremony, it is the young lawyer who keels over, exorcised of his inability to love, and he and the girl go forth to face life together.

In what it juxtaposes and contrasts--chant and wisecrack, surrealism and photography, insanity and farce, demonology and Freud--The Tenth Man is telling and sharp. And Playwright Chayefsky has an equally good ear for the colloquial speech of his Jews as for their dialectical pomposities. But in spattering its theatrical vignettes with philosophic question marks, The Tenth Man takes on obligations it does not meet. Far from turning fantasy into vision, it fails to save it from sentimentality. Not only are all the play's characters uniformly nice, but exorcism seems a convenient miracle drug, and the happily vanishing young couple suggests the schizophrenia of playwrights who would give meaning to their words and eat them too. In certain ways, The Tenth Man suggests the fine stories of Jewish Fantasist Bernard Malamud (TIME, May 12, 1958) but in the ways that count most, it falls far short of them.

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