New Plays in Manhattan

The Man From Cairo (adapted by Dan Goldberg from the French of YvanNoe; produced by Michael Todd) escapes only by a technicality from being listed as Old Play in Manhattan. In a changing world, it is the kind of staple that links generation to generation. For here is the mousy, much-married little Government clerk (Joseph Buloff) who one night a month sneaks out in evening clothes and makes romantic love in a smart restaurant to a sophisticated young girl (Helen Chandler). The plot, starting off lustily to the tune of Wine, Women & Song, decorously ends up to the strains of Home, Sweet Home.

Since this stage tale is very likely one of grandma's earliest recollections of the theatre, all it has left to go on by now is the treatment of the mossy situations as they recur. Last week in The Man From Cairo the situations, despite some pleasant acting and fleeting comedy, were no match for the law of diminishing return. The author has been chiefly original for turning The Man From Cairo into what might be called dining-room comedy, with the principals eating their way through three acts. There were those in the opening-night audience who wondered whether they shouldn't have been provided with menus rather than programs.

Washington Jitters (by John Boruff & Walter Hart, based on the novel by Dalton Trumbo; produced by the Theatre Guild & the Actors Repertory Company) takes up New Deal Washington in alphabetical disorder, provides a slapstick version of how Government administrators are born. When pallid Sign Painter Henry Hogg (Fred Stewart) sets down on a desk a sign labeled COORDINATOR, he is mistaken by a newshawk for the Pooh-Bah of the mythical ASP (Agricultural Survey Program), and in no time Coordinator Hogg has become the social lion, the political barometer and the personal headache of Administration and Opposition alike.

Wriggling ears and cracking knuckles Right & Left, knocking the stuffing out of many a shirt, referring to F. D. R. as "The Fireside," Washington Jitters is more fireside than fireworks, more Lilliput than Brobdingnag. Its chief trouble is that it is not caustic enough for satire, not cockeyed enough for farce. Most important of all, it lacks that backlog which political travesties on the stage have always relied on: music.

The Bourbons Got the Blues (by

Carlton Moss & Dorothy Hailparn; produced by the Negro Cultural Committee) was a loose-limbed propagandist revue dramatizing the Negro's long struggle against oppression. Enjoying the Sunday-night services of such Negro stars as Bandleader Duke Ellington, Actor Rex Ingram (Haiti) and Actor Frank Wilson (All the Living), The Bourbons Got the Blues waved its arms excitedly but only shuffled its feet. Besides using a bare stage, the show reduced most of its sketches to dry monologue: a six-scene, one-man drama describing the abortive South Carolina slave insurrection of 1822 led by Denmark Vesey; a two-scene, one-woman picture of The Bronx's notorious Slave Market where Negro domestic workers, standing on street corners, sell their labor at starvation wages; a long, florid speech delivered in 1852 by famed Negro Abolitionist Frederick Douglass (Rex Ingram).

Short on comedy, The Bourbons Got the Blues got its chief bounce from a satiric ballet summarizing the Senate filibuster against the Anti-Lynching Bill. Blaring out, through a loudspeaker, verbatim excerpts from the speeches of Senator Ellender and Bilbo, prancing about in a good deal of pantomimic horseplay, Filibuster slid now & then into a fancy-tickling moment, as when a whole stageful of Senators suddenly started playing with toys.

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