New Plays in Manhattan

On Borrowed Time (adapted by Paul Osborn from the novel by Lawrence Edward Watkin; produced by Dwight Deere Wiman). First-nighters at On Borrowed Time ached from applauding. Critics went back to their offices and wrote starry-eyed reviews. Speculators promptly invested in an eight-week buy. But here & there a cold fish issued coldly from the playhouse, willing to admit that it had been a pleasant enough evening, but nothing more. In any case, it had been all about a lovable old codger (Dudley Digges) who saved his little orphaned grandson from the clutches of a prim, pious, perfectly terrible maiden aunt by chasing imminent Death (known as Mr. Brink) up an apple tree and keeping him there.

On this axis the play, now whimsically, now racily, now sentimentally, keeps turning throughout many scenes. Sound instinct in Playwright Osborn prevents the story from getting mawkish or unwieldy. A lot of salty cussing on the old man's part gives the play feet as well as wings. And an extremely cute seven-year-old (Peter Holden) makes everything seem innocent and wholesome.

But the characters are stencils: the shaggy, hard-cidery old grandpa; the devoted, 'disapproving old grandma; the pre-Freudian, high-neck-and-long-sleeves maiden aunt; the warm-hearted servant girl (Peggy O'Donnell). Some of the humor gets grey hairs: The tenth time grandma upbraids grandpa for swearing is scarcely as funny as the first. The narrative, toward the end, begins to stagger and stutter. And Mr. Brink (Frank Conroy) stays up in the apple tree long enough to make the captious wonder if it isn't time for the leaves to turn. But that may be because the tree looks (as grandpa would put it) so goddamn natural.

The Bridal Crown (by Johan August Strindberg; produced by Experimental Theatre, Inc.). A group of actors "making their first public appearance on any stage" dove headfirst last week into the swirling torrent of half-mad Swedish genius. A thrice-married woman-hater of violent emotions, Playwright Strindberg (1849-1912) left off hating in The Bridal Crown to dramatize a spooky legend of guilt and redemption. Kersti (Aurora Bonney) trades her illegitimate baby to a witch in return for the crown which only virgins may wear at their wedding. After the wedding, the crown falls into a mill race and the search for it fishes up the dead child. The rest of the story concerns the fate of an essentially pure girl at the hands of an evil puritan community. Folklore, fantasy and mysticism clutter up the action, and moments of barebone tragedy give way to wobbling make-believe.

Inferior to Strindberg's The Father and Lady Julia, The Bridal Crown needs miraculously controlled acting to stay within bounds. Except for Aurora Bonney, the cast snubbed all current theories of acting, kept declaiming as from the scaffold, made a stage whisper sound like a call to arms.

Coriolanus (by William Shakespeare, acting version by Charles Hopkins; produced by the New York State Federal Theatre Project). Last week Broadway had its first chance to see Coriolanus since 1885. The play has never prospered in the theatre because, while it has high temperatures of rage and subnormal chills of scorn, it seldom strikes the 98.6DEG of ordinary human emotion. But what Broadway saw last week was a story which, though it lacks tremolo, shrills along as vibrant and masculine as a trumpet call.

Some spectators may have been amused by the WPA's sponsorship of a play exalting a Roman hero who spits on the common people. But none could deny that this drama of a patrician banished from Rome for not truckling to the plebs, and joining with his former enemies to wreck his own country, builds up in massive blocks of action. And none could deny that at least once--when the hero's mother comes to plead with him to spare his native Rome--the drama unfolds an intensely human scene.

In uprising and downfall alike, Coriolanus (Erford Gage) commands admiration. The fickle, "garlic-eating'' mob is brought on largely to be sneered at; the wily tribunes of the people slink about as if they expected hisses. All this is faithful to Shakespeare's intentions; but, whatever Shakespeare's sympathies, it is no wronged hero he portrays--Coriolanus is a flawed, fissured, overpassionate man whose intemperate actions are his undoing.

Best thing about the current production is its shrewdly cropped text. Worst thing is that the actors prance around too much in the aisles. Most unimaginative thing is the old-school, highbusted performance.

Our Town (by Thornton W11der; produced by Jed Harris). Last week 40-year-old Novelist Thornton Wilder (The Bridge of San Luis Rey) achieved a 25-year-old ambition. He became a playwright in full Broadway standing. His play, moreover, proved him as adventurous in the theatre as he is cloistered at novel-writing. Concerned with life in a small New Hampshire community, Our Town is performed with nothing on the stage but a few tables, chairs and stepladders to indicate the town's geography. Partly imitating Chinese methods, Playwright Wilder has veteran Actor Frank Craven serve as property man, traffic cop, living newspaper and cracker-barrel philosopher. The whole effect gives ten times as much "theatre" as conventional scenery could give.

The plot of Our Town centres in a bashful boy-and-girl romance, but the general theme is more properly the chores and pleasures of Grover Corners as a whole. Without solemnity. Wilder seeks to transform the commonplaces of village life into the verities of human existence. Using fibred dialogue and lucid pantomime, for two acts he catches the fumbling wonderment of ordinary people, cakes their life with humor, charges it with feeling. The emotional climate is exactly right: warm, but dry.

The third act makes a sharp turn off Main Street. It is laid in a cemetery: time has passed, many townspeople have died. The dead sit rigidly on camp chairs, while close at hand a mass of huddled wet umbrellas evoke a funeral. The dead girl comes to join the other dead. But she still yearns for the living. Permitted to return among them, she sees how blindly they grope through life, comes back to the cemetery eager to forget. Living people, Wilder seems to say, miss most of experience; only the dead get down to essences. But this moral needs no such circuitous statement, should not be interwoven with all the mysticism and high-flown speculation that Wilder insists on adding. A good playwright when he deals with living people, he is only a bad philosopher when he deals with dead ones.

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