New Play on Broadway

The Best Man (by Gore Vidal), Broadway's salute to an election year, is a lively theater piece laid at a fanciful 1960 national convention and concerned with a fierce struggle between two would-be nominees. Former Secretary of State Melvyn Douglas is urbane, intellectual and endowed with scruples; Senator Frank Lovejoy is self-made, self-obsessed and swollen with ambition. When a tough old pro of an ex-President rejects the role of kingmaker, Lovejoy plans to knock out Douglas by reviving a forgotten mental breakdown; and if Douglas will stoop, he in turn can bring up an old Army scandal.

From there on till near the end, The Best Man chronicles a pretty traditional struggle between a set hero and a set villain, and much of the play's interest lies in the sheer simplicity of this. Despite its election-year coloring, The Best Man is really a hardy perennial in the way it sets ethics against opportunism, statesmanship against careerism, and light against darkness. In the course of the evening, any number of real-life names and topical references crop up. Dinner parties will thrive on arguing who's who, or who's half-who, among the play's characters. But Playwright Vidal knows that to keep things spinning, storytelling means more than anecdote-mongering, and a protagonist more than a prototype. The Best Man provides little about issues or rival parties; indeed it all but obliterates the idea of there being any second party.

A modern-angled political morality play, it yet never forgets that bad politics make good theater, that stage tricks pale beside political ones.

Briskly staged by Joseph Anthony, The Best Man gets an able production. Melvyn Douglas is firm, suave and never priggish; Frank Lovejoy is much more than a mere stage villain; and Lee Tracy, fine as the ex-President, leaves a void when he is killed off before the end.

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