New Play in Manhattan

The Dominant Sex (by Michael Egan; Busbar & Tuerk, producers). In his lonely vigils as a seagoing radio operator, Playwright Egan has had ample opportunity to meditate the multiplicity of woman's wiles. Result is that he has practically cataloged in his first play the whole bag of tricks by which a woman gets her way. In fact, he has displayed them so conclusively that his audience is likely to feel that in awarding the final victory to his hero instead of to his heroine, Playwright Egan has turned in an extremely raw decision.

As impersonated by big-eyed, golden-haired Actress Helen Chandler, Angela Shale is a young woman who looks like an angel out of Heaven, but generally acts like the most mischievous little shrew who ever sat on a ducking stool. By tears, coquetry, wheedling, imprecations, she is bound and determined to make her husband sell his electrical invention to the power trust, accept a steady job and settle down in an all-electric house in the suburbs. Alternately dazzled by his wife's charm and enraged by her breezy feminine sophistry, Dick Shale (Bramwell Fletcher) is equally determined to exploit his invention on his own, buy back and return to his family's farm. Angela's chief weapon is her glib ability to change the subject of an argument. Slow-witted Dick's most effective device is to throttle her when she does so. That he ultimately gets the farm is due more to clumsy main force than to tactical skill in debate.

Interested spectators at this domestic duel are the Shales's suburban neighbors, a footloose wife and her browbeaten husband (A. E. Matthews). Good indeed is Actor Matthews' gloomy soliloquy on the virtues of the all-electric house he lives in, while pulling off & on a glove, a minute and abstracted gesture which somehow makes hugely eloquent his character's total dimwittedness.

Somewhere between playing the little prince to John Barrymore's Richard III and her outstanding comic success in Springtime for Henry, Helen Chandler managed to make herself one of the U. S. Stage's more attractive and plausible ingenues.

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