New Plays in Manhattan

Censored (by Conrad Seiler & Max Marcin; produced by A. H. Woods, Ltd.). No one at the opening of Censored last week could feel quite sure that he wouldn't suddenly be catapulted on the stage, told to go out and hide during the intermission, or forced to take part in a torchlight procession down Broadway. Playwrights Seiler & Marcin were throwing surprises around like hand grenades. Actors were planted all over the audience. People tore tirelessly up and down the aisles. Other people orated from a box. At the end of Act I, cops raided the show for obscenity. But it wasn't the show they raided. It was a show within a show. At the end of Act III, the cast staged a sit-down strike. But it wasn't a show within a show they were striking against. It was a show made out of the show within a show.

The audience was supplied with two kinds of programs, but what it needed was a chart. Underneath all the clowning and gagging, the clumsy acting and dated horseplay, the authors were apparently offering a propaganda play for peace. But, as Englishman John Wilkes said of the Peace of Paris, it was like the peace of God, which passeth all understanding.

Wine of Choice (by S. N. Behrman; produced by the Theatre Guild) is less a play than an animated political spectrum. Its gamut runs from deepest Tory purple to brightest revolutionary red. Plumped down in a Long Island guest cottage, a Bourbon, a Conservative, a Liberal and a Communist behave much more like a Bourbon, a Conservative, a Liberal and a Communist than like human beings. To provide a dash of plot, three of the men take turns wooing a young lady (Claudia Morgan). To provide a dash of sex, Playwright Behrman does not forget that politics makes strange bedfellows.

Playwright Behrman, whose early plays (The Second Man, Brief Moment) were in the Maugham-Lonsdale drawing-room tradition, has leased his present guest cottage from George Bernard Shaw. But where Shaw, in his comedies, flung out blasting paradoxes that were subversive in their day, Behrman is content to exploit merely fashionable thinking.

Most successful characters in Wine of Choice are two fussy, epicene old bachelors--Charlie (Herbert Yost), who has pulled himself up by his bootlicking, and Binkie (Alexander Woollcott), a sort of subsidized busybody. These two live in a world of nail-scissors jabs, of milliner's mischief, which Behrman can reproduce with gusto. His treatment of bigger issues seems bookish, blueprinted.

The play, which needed a fillip, got one from the presence of Alexander Woollcott in the cast. Owlish, jowlish, portly and plump, he carefully watched his p's and cues, showed exemplary presence.

Fifty-one years old, long a Manhattan celebrity, today a nationally-known figure, Woollcott has worked many a field in his time. As dramatic critic, first on the New York Times, later on the New York Herald, Sun and World, he gushed one day like a Southern belle, the next flogged, like Simon Legree. As playwright, he collaborated with George S. Kaufman on the moderately successful Channel Road (1929), Dark Tower (1933). As contributor to The New Yorker, he wrote with equal vivacity on anagrams and croquet, of crime and parlor games. As author, he wrote books about dogs, the theatre, Irving Berlin, Mrs. Fiske (his stage idol), Dickens (his literary idol), achieved a best-seller with While Rome Burns. As editor, he compiled The Woollcott Reader and Woollcott's Second Reader, 1,100 pages which reveal Woollcott's chief reasons for reading: a good laugh or a good cry. As Town Crier, on the radio, he charmed with his anecdotes, pumped books he liked, made best-sellers of such works as James Hilton's Goodbye, Mr. Chips, Alexander Woollcott's While Rome Burns. As town wit, he sat far above the salt when the Hotel Algonquin's famed Round Table was the spawning ground of Manhattan sophisticates, has long terrorized his enemies with his thrusts, has served without pay as publicity agent for such other town wits as Dorothy Parker, Robert Benchley, George S. Kaufman.

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