New Plays in Manhattan

All Good Americans (by Sidney J. and Laura West Perelman; Courtney Burr, producer) is a glib notation on the way some U. S. citizens, who live year-round in Paris, drink, wisecrack, pose and suffer. A tall, indolent young writer (Fred Keating) vaguely wishes he could afford to marry a striding, firm-chinned Paris fashion expert with a dazzling smile (Hope Williams). He is reduced to living off commissions from Paris stores to which he steers rich U. S. girls, finally resigns himself to the idea of marrying one. With laconic bitterness Hope Williams counters by encouraging a rich New York suburbanite. Between rough sentiment, brandies, wisecracks and spoofing their aching hearts, the two hand each other insults that stick. This warfare continues against an unwholesome Paris gallery of reporters, U. S. dress buyers, tennis champions, and one superb banjo-playing Southerner. In a final scene Keating and Williams disguise the fact that they are glad to be together again by burlesquing an old-fashioned cinema situation. Keating as the villain pretends to usher her into his mountain hunting lodge, offer her a drink. Williams as the innocent young girl pretends to go behind a screen, take off her wet clothes, put on her dressing gown. She enacts a mock defense of her chastity until Keating embraces her in a final kiss that audiences are expected to believe is suddenly genuine, profoundly felt.

Co-Author Sidney Perelman, sometime cartoonist, funnyman and scenarist for the Marx Brothers, is famed for his comic writing in which cliches, puns, misunderstandings, paraphrases of oldtime cinema captions, tall talk and dull talk are jumbled together. But All Good Americans, a naturalistic play on hardboiled lovers, is not improved by being peppered with Perelman jokes, new, old, sometimes funny. The lines and action are sophisticated, superficial, curiously unreal.

Excellent as is Hope Williams, who has become the theatre's prime impersonator of Park Avenue sophisticates, Fred Keating runs away with the show. A onetime vaudeville and night club magician, he made his drama debut last spring in Forsaking All Others (TIME, March 13), still thinks he would rather be master of ceremonies in a variety show.

Tobacco Road (adapted by Jack Kirkland from Erskine Caldwell's novel; Anthony Brown, producer). Country squalor, never as bad as city squalor, lies over Robert Redington Sharpe's single stage set of a tenant farmer's shack, front yard and well in the Georgia tobacco country. Even the smell of hot dust, of unwashed bedding and dried food leavings seems to drift out over Manhattan audiences. In this unhurried shiftless atmosphere the events of Tobacco Road stretch themselves with lazy brutality. Compressing in time rather than exaggerating in degree the sordid materialism of lazy back-countrymen, it moved Manhattan reviewers to call its characters "livestock," "pigs," "guinea pigs," "weird savages," "the primitive human animal writhing in the throes of gender," "foul and degenerate parcel of folks," "the hangdog and hookworm set."

Characters: Patriarch Jeeter Lester (Henry Hull), a bent, rickety, boastful, obscene, stealing, lying scion of an old family who has discovered that semi-starvation is the only penalty for doing nothing; his wife Ada (Margaret Wycherly), mother of 16 of whom 13 have forgotten her; her unmanageable harelipped daughter Ellie May, tortured with the abnormal appetites of the deformed; her golden-haired daughter Pearl who somehow manages to remain a wife in name only; Pearl's normal husband Lov who bought her for $7, loves her vainly, beats her moderately; Jeeter and Ada's remaining son Dude whose pastime is bouncing a ball, whose dream is an automobile horn; a middle-aged prostitute turned evangelist who makes Dude her lawful pastime by buying him an automobile horn with automobile attached.

The dusty yard crawls with lechery. Lov lusts for his runaway Pearl. Ellie May for Lov, the lady evangelist for young Dude, Jeeter for the evangelist. An external plot arrives in the person of a bank agent come to put Jeeter off the land. For the $100 annual rent required, Jeeter sends Son Dude off in his new car in an unsuccessful attempt to borrow the money from another son. The car runs over Mother Ada. As she dies, Jeeter nabs Pearl with a view to selling her back to her husband for the rent money. Slyly claiming a mother's right, dying Ada embraces Pearl, bites Jeeter's hand. Pearl escapes to the big city of Augusta. Sorrowfully, Jeeter returns to his front porch and dozes off, the rent problem still unsolved.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.