New Plays in Manhattan

Stop-Over (by Matt and Sam Taylor; produced by Chase Productions, Inc.). To prove that suffering regenerates the human spirit, the Brothers Taylor coop up an odd lot of sinners for one night, torment them with gunplay and passion, turn them loose before dawn, chastened and wiser.

A better melodrama than a sermon, Stop-Over assembles its characters by a neat device. On the night that Bartley Langthorne (Sidney Blackmer), a played-out romantic actor, returns to his small town mansion for a rest cure, Halloween pranksters plant a Tourists Accommodated sign in his front yard. Tourists pour in, but cannot pour out because the housekeeper's gangster husband (Arthur Byron) holds them prisoners with his gun.

Norris Houghton has designed a perfect setting for melodrama, a mid-Victorian living room encrusted with gimcracks and statues, any one of which might inspire crime. But Stop-Over, after a good takeoff, gets bogged in its own dull subplots. Its chief actor, Blackmer, is left stranded with nothing to do but make wry cracks.

Best performance: Arthur Byron, as the gangster who is remorseful for having been a bad father but disgusted that his own son should be inept enough to fall into the clutches of the cops.

The Greatest Show on Earth (by Vincent Duffey & Irene Alexander; produced by Bonfils & Somnes, Inc.). Playwrights Duffey and Alexander seem unable to decide whether they are satirizing mankind or writing seriously about the anguish of caged beasts. The result is occasionally funny, occasionally mordant, mostly an addled mixture. Partly atoning for the commonplace writing of The Greatest Show on Earth are its ingenious costumes, handsome production, and the acting of Edgar Stehli as Slimy, the serpent. As he slithers among the bears and elephants, hissing in Cockney, inciting Leo the Lion (Anthony Ross) to murder the Keeper, Actor Stehli commits only one zoological error. He wickedly nickers his tongue to show malice. Real snakes, without malice, flicker their tongues to smell.

Yr Obedient Husband (by Horace Jackson; produced by Marwell Productions, Inc.). Marwell Productions is the sheerly corporate cloak of Actors Fredric March & wife (Florence Eldridge) and Play Director John Cromwell. For Yr Obedient Husband, Actor March returned to the stage after some ten years in Hollywood, where a prime specialty of his has been rakehellish roles. But in raking through the career of Richard Steele, 18th Century London journalist & man-about-town. Playwright Jackson had failed to scrape together enough action for three acts. What he had written was a costume play on wordy marital misunderstandings. When the critical votes were counted, there were no thumbs up. After six performances the Marches & Director Cromwell took the hint with rare good humor. Their show closed the next night, but before it did Marwell Productions took to the advertising columns of Manhattan's newspapers with a graceful exit line:

Tortilla Flat (adapted by Jack Kirkland; produced by Jack Kirkland & Sam H. Grisman). Critics, like partridges, should never be shot sitting. That this sportsmanlike principle still lingers on Broadway was evidenced last week.

When Dramatist Jack Kirkland presented his version of Erskine Caldwell's Tobacco Road, Manhattan's critics almost unanimously damned the play, not only as a disgusting exhibition but as a clumsy job of playwriting. The play is still running, four years later. Last week Kirkland's latest adaptation, this time of Author John Steinbeck's Tortilla Flat, a story of squalid life among the California Paisanos, drew another broadside of critical damnation. Sharpest words were those of Richard Watts Jr., Herald Tribune'?, bespectacled young play critic, a schoolmate of Kirkland's at Columbia University 18 years ago. Said he: ". . . A sly and disagreeable chronicle of an unappetizing lot of unpleasant people with funny dialects . . . surprisingly feeble . . . pretty dismal ... as bad as the Steinbeck dramatization of Of Mice and Men is good" (TIME, Dec. 6).

Like most Herald Tribune men, Critic Watts dines regularly at Jack Bleeck's (pronounced Blake's) Artists & Writers tavern a few doors from the newspaper office. Into Bleeck's next evening burst outraged Dramatist Kirkland, battle in his nostrils. He found Critic Watts discussing a steak.

"Stand up, Watts!" he stormed. "I've been looking for you all day."

Critic Watts demurred, advised Kirkland to cool off in the bar, promised to meet him there after dinner and settle their difference.

The moment Watts appeared, Kirkland opened fire with a glancing right to the jaw. More surprised than hurt, Watts staggered, fell on his knee. At the sight of his great & good friend & customer half-floored, Tavernkeeper Bleeck, shouting. "We don't have fights in here! We don't have fights in here!" sailed into Kirkland. So did the foreman of the Herald Tribune's press room, also did Diner Ralph Hewitt, onetime Columbia football captain, who was quick to get the idea. Then Watts's dinner companions stepped in, halted the affray.

The hurly-burly over, Dramatist Kirkland, singularly unmarked after all the mauling, sat down with Critic Watts, explained his action. Said he: "It wasn't for me; it was for the cast." But it was also in vain. Tortilla Flat closed three days later.

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