New Play in Manhattan

Two on an Island (by Elmer Rice; produced by The Playwrights' Company) is fiery Elmer Rice in unembattled mood, painting a gaudy picture of Manhattan, telling the story of youth's slow struggle and love's young dream. The play is pleasant, picturesque, shallow. Midwestern Boy (John Craven), who has been pounding the city pavements, meets New England Girl (Betty Field), who has been eluding the city Lotharios, high up in the Statue of Liberty. They do not meet till the start of Act III, but the end of Act III runs true to form.

Playwright Rice cannily offers the audience more than just Boy Meets Girl; his real hero is Manhattan Island. With dozens of minor characters, scenes in subways, taxis, rubberneck wagons, a producer's office, an artist's studio, an all-night Coffee Pot, the Metropolitan Museum, the play brightly wanders all around the town--without ever really getting inside it. Its people--the opportunist and the radical, the glamor girl and the little old lady, the sailor and the floozy (Ann Thomas)--are all cut out of cardboard. Only Rice's bitter, cynical, wisecracking producer walks on his own legs, and even he is stagy.

With something of the same picturesqueness, Two on an Island has none of the force or feeling that made Rice's Street Scene truly expressive of a phase of New York life. Like Imperial City, Rice's flashy novel about Manhattan, Two on an Island is slicker than sincere, more lifelike than alive. It's a pretty safe bet in the theatre that, when Boy Meets Girl, Artist Meets Waterloo.

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