New Plays in Manhattan

Flowers of the Forest (by John van Druten; Katharine Cornell, producer). Scientific romancers have for years toyed with the notion of a super-radio which, reaching out into time and space, would overtake receding sound waves, reproduce such historic utterances as Lincoln's Gettysburg Address or Shakespeare's remarks after the opening performance of Hamlet. With more daring than credibility, Playwright, van Druten (Young Woodley) has seized upon the idea of recapturing thoughts expressed in the past as the crux for a dramatic sermon on the wastage of war. A rich and sympathetic husband has provided Naomi Jacklin (Katharine Cornell) with the material to build a mental barricade against her personal War tragedy. In 1914 she was in love with a poet. Life at the front so embittered him that Naomi came to believe he hated her. Accordingly, she did away with their unborn, illegitimate child. Later she heard that on his deathbed her lover had babbled a verse which began on a new note of hope. For 20 years Naomi wondered if there had been something in this unfinished poem to bring them together again. Playwright van Druten's answer comes from the mouth of a tuberculous young genius (Burgess Meredith) who visits the Jacklins' home to look at their pictures, rages against the folly of war, is stricken by one of his mysterious headaches. In a trance, he echoes the dying poet's feverish appeal for Naomi's forgiveness, finishes the verse. Mrs. Jacklin realizes that all her life since the War has been an empty acceptance of the "second best."

After noting the artistic bankruptcy of Flowers of the Forest, critics could only record that Playwright van Druten had spoken, but not very succinctly, in a worthy cause. His flashbacks to Wartime England seem singularly unexciting, while his contemporary scenes make peace appear as dismal as war. Spectators were most disappointed by the voice-from-beyond scene, a difficult illusion which failed to get across the footlights, through no fault of Miss Cornell and her excellent supporting cast. Though he played his part as the stricken oracle with ingratiating charm, Burgess Meredith could not help tripping over Mr. van Druten's script.

Burgess Meredith began his brief career on Broadway two years ago by playing the Duck, Dormouse and Tweedledee in Eva Le Gallienne's production of Alice in Wonderland. He was a reform school hellion in Little Ol' Boy and a snippy Princetonian with white buckskin shoes in She Loves Me Not. For the past ten months he has been the voice of "Red" Davis, that hero of U. S. juveniles on the Beech-Nut radio hour. Grandson of a Protestant minister of Cleveland, Ohio, Meredith was sent to Manhattan to sing in the Cathedral of St. John the Divine choir, later began working his way through Amherst by washing dishes. He quit that after a year, took up newspaper work at which he was cheerful but unsuccessful, got his first chance on the stage through the recommendation of a dancer friend. Critics like his freshness and sincerity and the Cornell pressagent is billing him as "the Hamlet of 1940."

Ceiling Zero (by Frank Wead; Brock Pemberton, producer). The cycle of breezy institutional drama started by The Front Page has exploited the Salvation Army (Torch Song), the circus (Privilege Car), the side show (The Great Magoo), the hospital (Men in White) and even the penny arcade (Penny Arcade). But until Ceiling Zero came along, no playwright had felt qualified to dramatize the excitement and color surrounding the operations of a commercial airline. That job has fallen to Lieut. Commander Frank Wead, U. S. N. retired, leader of the Navy's 1923 Schneider Cup squadron, who turned to fiction and the cinema after he broke his neck by tumbling down a stairway at his San Diego home nine years ago.

In Ceiling Zero, Dizzy Davis, presented as the daredevil-great lover of the aeronautical world, goes back to work for Federal Air Lines at Newark, where he disrupts a pure romance between a hostess and the chief pilot, is partly responsible for a friend's fatal crash and at last goes out to die heroically in a fog over the Alleghenies. All this is accompanied by a buzz of ribaldry and shop talk (a program glossary explains that "cotton," "dirt," "gloom," "goo" and "bird-walking weather" all mean fog) from an assorted crew of mechanics, Government inspectors, plane manufacturers, insurance adjusters and fliers presided over by saturnine Osgood Perkins as the hard-bitten division superintendent.

There is one spectacular scene in which an aviator, whose receiving set has gone dead, is heard talking and joking by radio to the ground force just before he cracks up virtually onstage in an attempt to land in a fog. Largely because of this harrowing sequence, and the arrant Boy Scoutism among the pilots off duty, Ceiling Zero does not make a convincing advertisement for air travel.

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