New Plays in Manhattan

The Simpleton of the Unexpected Isles (by George Bernard Shaw; Theatre Guild, producers). Fifty years ago last week a young man with lots of self-confidence sat down in the reading room of the British Museum to write his first play. He called it Widowers' Houses. George Bernard Shaw had already met with indifferent success as an orator, fictionist and Fabian Society member when Dramacritic William Archer presented him with a skeleton plot and persuaded him to turn his talents toward the theatre. It was not long before Shaw was back with the news that he needed more plot, having used up all Archer had given him before he was halfway through the first act.

Audiences at the world premiere of his 33rd full-length play in Manhattan last week found that a half century had not improved Bernard Shaw as a dramatic structuralist. Loyal Shavians were quite prepared for that, since their idol has never wasted much time on the packaging of his products. What they were not prepared for was the woefully stale and shopworn condition of the product itself.

In The Simpleton of the Unexpected Isles, as usual, some painfully normal English folk were thrust into an eccentric setting, this time among the godlike inhabitants of an island just arisen from the sea. Strutting his pretty taste in paradox, Playwright Shaw again discussed polygamy, Empire, the Church, vegetarianism, Fascism, Indian Independence, medicine.

But as the prolog dragged into the first act and the first act into the second, The Simpleton of the Unexpected Isles cast a thick pall over its audience. Here was not only nonsense, but tiresomely outmoded nonsense. Critical verdict was unanimous: The show should never have been staged.

What made the play's failure doubly pathetic was that, despite Arms and the Man (1894). Candida (1894), Caesar and Cleopatra (1898), Man and Superman (1902), Major Barbara (1905), Getting Married (1908) and Pygmalion (1912), George Bernard Shaw had at 78 just been voted in a British newspaper poll the public's greatest bore (TIME, Feb. 25).

Awake and Sing! (by Clifford Odets; Group Theatre, Inc., producer) is an earnest investigation of the home life of a family of Bronx Jews. The burden of Playwright Odets' lament is that the Bergers and their friends would not be so wretched if it were not for the crushing tyranny of the capitalist system. Grandfather Berger, an old Marxist, would not be compelled to jump off the roof in despair. Daughter Hennie would not have to marry a simpleton after Moe Axelrod, the embittered disabled veteran, gives her a baby. Son Ralph would not have to pine for the sweetheart and sport shoes he cannot possess on his $16-a-week salary.

Admirably acted, carefully produced and for the most part intelligently and honestly written, Awake and Sing! seems to have unexpectedly backfired on Playwright Odets. His triumphal ending, with Brother Ralph profiting by Grandfather's insurance and Sister Hennie and Axelrod running away to Bermuda on his pension, depends ironically on two prime financial usufructs of the economic system which Playwright Odets has spent two hours browbeating.

The Bishop Misbehaves (by Frederic Jackson; John Golden, producer). The Bishop of Broadminster (Walter Connolly) always wanted to be a detective. The sins of his flock were trifling. It saddened him to think what a resourceful criminologist Scotland Yard lost when he donned the cloth. As a consolation he steeped himself in the lore of the underworld. Consequently he was thoroughly equipped to deal with the situation when he and his sister walked into a rural public house on the heels of an ingenious jewel robbery.

In solving this affair, the Bishop had recourse to the more exoteric passages of his criminal literature. He drew his deductions from such conventional clues as fingerprints and lipstick stains on glasses. He blinded the thieves with an old-fashioned puff of snuff. And by turning out the lights he tricked them into his cellar when they appeared at his manse in search of the loot he took from them. With the culprits incarcerated below stairs, His Lordship has time to disentangle a pair of lovers from the plot, send them off toward the altar before the curtain falls on this amusing dramatic puffball.

The Distant Shore (by Donald Blackwell & Theodore St. John; Dwight Deere Wiman, producer.) In 1910 a U. S. patent medicine salesman and unlicensed dentist named Hawley Harvey Crippen gave his wife, a music hall wench, an overdose of hyoscine, chopped up her remains, buried them in the coal cellar of their London home. He then took his secretary into the house to live with him, fled to Montreal on the S.S. Montrose when his late wife's friends infected Scotland Yard with their suspicions. The only elements in the Crippen case which might possibly raise it above the low level of other murders, were: 1) in flight the secretary wore boy's clothes; 2) when detectives on the faster Laurentic overtook the Montrose, wireless was used for the first time to apprehend a fugitive criminal. Taken back to England, the bald, walrus-mustached, unattractive little uxoricide was hanged. The secretary went free.

Prettied up, this is the tale of The Distant Shore. The play is as dull as the crime itself. What interest it has lies in the fact that the murderer is impersonated by Roland Young.

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