New Plays in Manhattan

Whiteoaks (adapted by Mazo de la Roche from her novel Whiteoaks of Jalna; produced by Victor Payne-Jennings). Chief distinction of Whiteoaks is its 101-year-old heroine, played to the age limit by Ethel Barrymore. A wealthy, imperious, chops-licking war horse, Gran Whiteoak is surrounded by an obsequious tribe worrying over who will inherit her money. Neither her fuddy-duddy children nor her horsy grandchildren are prepared to see it go to Finch, the family neurotic (Stephen Haggard), and they kick up quite a rumpus when it does.

Mazo de la Roche's Jalna, novels are second-rate Forsyte Saga, gain nothing from being dramatized. As a picture of genteel rapacity, Whiteoaks does nothing in three acts it could not do better in one. Its sharpish characterizations never make up for its dragging plot. Actress Barrymore, looking like a cross between her Brother Lionel and the wolf dressed up as Red Riding Hood's grandmother, carries the whole play on her bent, centenarian back. Her expert performance gains in effect from the audience's kindly feeling that anything a 101-year-old woman says is remarkably witty.

All the Living (adapted by Hardie Albright from the book, I Knew 3,000 Lunatics, by Dr. Victor R. Small; produced by Cheryl Crawford). The theatre, having investigated slums, hospitals and prisons in recent years, last week turned its attention to an insane asylum. All the Living takes a steady, unhysterical look at the inside of an overcrowded, understaffed state institution, makes no attempt to prettify the facts, none to magnify the horrors. The mad, like the sane, have their differing personalities, and in an atmosphere vocally more suggestive of a bird shop than a human habitation. All the Living runs the gamut from a cheerful nut willing to swap the White House for a cigar to sex-tormented schoolteachers and victims of dementia praecox.

As a stage picture, the play is restless, intense, a tribute to Director Lee Strasberg's skill and care. But in an effort to turn honest document into honest-to-God drama, Playwright Albright introduces a hobbling version of the modern-minded young medico balked by his old-fogy superior, lugs in the love of two staff doctors for the same nurse. These concessions to plot bore like termites through the sound timber of the play's background, leave it rather hollow.

Thirty-four-year-old Producer Crawford and 36-year-old Director Strasberg have long worked together. In 1929 they, with Harold Clurman, founded an experimental studio under the auspices of Manhattan's Theatre Guild, three years later struck out for themselves as the Group Theatre. In the next five years the Group produced such unhackneyed plays as Paul Green's Johnny Johnson, Sidney Kingsley's Men in White, Clifford Odets' Awake & Sing!, Waiting for Lefty, Paradise Lost. Several of these plays were directed by Strasberg.

Early last fall came a parting of the ways. Amicably clashing over policy, Crawford and Strasberg withdrew from the Group, Clurman remained. Cheryl Crawford set up as her own producer, last week made her bow with All the Living. Strasberg became a free lance. Both Crawford and Strasberg represent the vanguard of the U. S. theatre; both have a background of foreign experimentalism. Strasberg, originally influenced by Actor-Director Constantine Stanislavsky of the famed Moscow Art Theatre, favors a naturalistic technique, insists that actors should "do all the small things, not worry about the big things."

Schoolhouse on the Lot (by Joseph A. Fields & Jerome Chodorov; produced by Philip Dunning). Last week Hollywood landed on Broadway again. The new wrinkle this time was the kids in pictures who, when they are not acting, go to school on the lot. Headliner among them is an itsy-bitchy angel face (Betty Philson) who starts the ball rolling by having her teacher fired. Thereafter, the dear old Goldwyn-rule days give way to the usual mad, noisy, illiterate, shyster antics of the movie industry. Maddest, noisiest, worst illiterate, biggest shyster is a movie magnate (Robert H. Harris) who looks as sinister as a Kewpie doll, acts as honorably as a double-crossing spy, throws telephones across the stage, never lets his right-hand man know what his left-hand man is doing, hires, fires, wheedles, fondles, gives his office the dignity of a bargain sale.

Headlong as a paper chase, Schoolhouse on the Lot is just as full of false scents and wasted motion. Playwrights Fields & Chodorov have used about 33 of the famed 36 original plots, scrambled them into doodlebug farce, peppered them with gags. Underneath the roughhousing is a healthy contempt for the method in Hollywood's madness, a keen eye for skulduggery. But compared with a Once in a Lifetime or a Boy Meets Girl, Schoolhouse on the Lot is too loud, too loopy, too larruping in its fun.

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