New Plays in Manhattan

Big Blow (by Theodore Pratt; produced by the Federal Theatre). An audience that ten days before had felt the stinging fingertips of the Atlantic hurricane, shivered through the last scenes of Big Blow when a Florida hurricane whistled and tore across the stage, left it in darkness, crumpled a huge revival tent like a paper bag. As exciting as superb sound effects (lent by Samuel Goldwyn) could make it, the big blow should rank among the season's tensest moments of "theatre."

In vividness and punch Big Blow is another Federal Theatre feat comparable to last season's Haiti. Dealing with the Florida Crackers--blood cousins to Erskine Caldwell's Tobacco Road poor whites--it paints a frightening picture of ignorance, prejudice, cruelty: the natives' Calibanesque way of life, their hatred of ""furriners"," their venom toward Negroes, their savage Holy Roller hysteria.

Vivid, Big Blow is also crude. Its startling picture is half-spoiled by a stale plot. Its genuine drama of the hurricane is tarnished by the regulation melodrama of the hack. For its effectiveness. Big Blow can thank its subject, not its playwright.

Kiss the Boys Goodbye (by Clare Boothe; produced by Brock Pemberton). The scene of a Clare Boothe play--however smart or sophisticated the sets may be--is a corpse-strewn battlefield. In The Women, warriors in Schiaparellish armor swept up & down Park Avenue, slaughtering, spreading poison gas, mowing one another down. In Kiss the Boys Goodbye, a second Civil War rages about the Connecticut countryside, and this time it is Grant who hands over his sword to Lee.

To a Connecticut weekend party comes Invader Cindy Lou Bethany (Helen Claire), a Georgia Congressman's daughter and blood kin of Culpeppers, Covingtons, Albemarles. She comes with a Hollywood director to meet a Hollywood producer and nail the screen role of Velvet O'Toole, the Confederate heroine of the national bestseller Kiss the Boys Goodbye. Prattling and coy, she comes, with a hoopskirt, a guitar and blatant pride of race, smack into the presence of the most brutal wisecrackers and merciless limbchoppers in Yankeedom.

People whose daily diet is strychnine retch at Cindy Lou's syrup. Her magnolia-bud ways with men make women who get their guys through manhole methods rage. Swiftly the whole house-party gangs up on her. Then Cindy Lou hits the roof, butts a fat columnist (John Alexander) in the belly, gives the crowd a 100-stripe tongue-lashing, spoils everybody's fun, cooks everybody's goose, flashes a revolver, and winds up with as much loot in Connecticut as Sherman's men got out of Georgia.

A spirited dynamic farce character, Cindy Lou becomes more than a burlesque of Gone With the Wind, achieves her own mannerisms, drawls her own lingo,* spits her own fire. Actress Claire plays her admirably. A terror for house parties in real life, Cindy Lou is the makings of one on the stage. By comparison with Cindy Lou, Playwright Boothe's wisecracking cutthroats are dramatically flat. While they smack balls at one another's heads, Cindy Lou, her toe dug into the baseline, drops unplayable shots at her opponents' feet.

Dame Nature (by Andre Birabeau; adapted by Patricia Collinge; produced by Theatre Guild Inc.). French writers every so often choose themes that would appall or embarrass other races. French Playwright Birabeau's Dame Nature tells how a 15-year-old boy, whose mother keeps him in short trousers to conceal her age, and a 15-year-old girl who runs a stationery shop are drawn together by loneliness, suddenly discover they are going to have a child. Only a race to whom sex is as natural as food could have treated the secret of these bewildered kids without making them either sentimental orphans of the storm or knowing little brats. Dame Nature sees what is touching about them, as when the worried boy must play host at a children's party while the girl is being confined; also sees what is comic, as when the boy wonders whether he can get a Boy Scout discount on a baby carriage.

But though Dame Nature handles its theme with tact, the theme does not stretch far enough. Slow and forced as often as it is novel and charming, the play has trouble, too, in achieving the right tone. It shuttles back & forth between seriousness and comedy, between realism and make-believe. Even the French do not quite know what to do with a father who is still studying algebra.

*Examples a slight go=to take a little straight corn whiskey; to be in a sntt=to be in a tantrum. Opposite of snit: whizzle.

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