New Plays in Manhattan

Fledgling (by Eleanor Carroll Chilton & Philip Lewis, produced by Otis Chatfield-Taylor). One of the hardest things in the drama is to make the fires of a purely interior, mental hell apparent to an audience. Usually only the greatest playwrights, the Ibsens and Chekhovs, can do it. Fledgling, adapted from Authoress Chilton's novel Follow the Furies, does it, though it is hardly a great play. It also does other, much less admirable things--confuses its central tragedy with subplots and religious argument in the manner of old-fashioned "problem plays." But the hell remains visible, registers hard.

It exists in the mind of the young daughter of a freethinking, "rational" novelist. When a slow paralysis threatens her mother's brain, the daughter tries to do the "rational" thing about her mother's predicament and kills her by poisoning. Then the girl is blasted by remorse and its religious overtones. In private agony she learns the limitations of intelligence. Turning to her father for help, she gets only his consistent but chilling advice that any assurance worth reaching she must reach by and in herself. Nor do the authors offer any facile solution. The girl finally kills herself, and it is made clear that it is bewildering pain, not a conviction of guilt, that drives her to it--that in the end she is still in doubt.

Pert, youthful Sylvia Weld, playing her first Broadway lead, gives a tense, natural portrayal of inner torment. Ralph (brother of Frank) Morgan seems rather too professional to be convincing as the father, but Tom Powers plays an intelligent priest to the life. John Hoysradt appears as an outrageously affected writer whose rasping impudence stabs the girl like a sword.

Many Manhattan critics, fixing on the intermittent "problem-play" tone of the drama, wrote of it with patronizing witticisms. An exception was the Post's sensitive, scholarly John Mason Brown, who gave Fledgling one of the longest play reviews of the season, said: "It treats playgoers as grownups and the theatre as an adult institution."

The Corn Is Green (by Emlyn Williams, produced by Herman Shumlin) joins a good sound sentimental play with just the actress for the job: Ethel Barrymore. Although its young Welsh author is best known in the U. S. for his murder drama Night Must Fall, this is no story of a psychopathic killer. It is a warm, wise semi-autobiography. It ran for nearly 700 performances in London, many during the blackout.

Most autobiographies centre on the autobiographer, but Playwright Williams', for reasons that become plain as the play progresses, centres on the character played by Ethel Barrymore. She is a cultivated, middle-aged spinster who moves to a Welsh village toward the end of the 19th Century, bent on educating the local coal miners. Discouraged by tory opposition, she gets the will to go on from the presence of one coal-stained boy who promises great talent.

The woman dedicates herself to helping him win an Oxford scholarship. By skillful flattery she finally adds to her cause the local squire, a tweedy, influential ass who exclaims: "The early 18th Century! When was that?" She is almost balked when her protege rebels against her authority, quarrels with her, and miserably rebounds into a pub and the arms of a feverish young girl whom he thereupon gets with child. But in the end the teacher overcomes even this obstacle; she agrees to take the baby herself, let the girl go off to a paramour she has found elsewhere.

Playwright Williams fleshes this simple outline with characters that evoke the love, ambition, pathos of teaching and learning. He does it so well that one of the most moving curtains in recent Broadway history is Ethel Barrymore's slow, incredulous, joyous reading of the boy's first stumbling but poetical essay.

From the time when she enters, straw-hatted, rolling her bicycle, Barrymore gives the schoolmistress such reality that when she climbs a staircase leading offstage it seems certain she will pass into unseen rooms in the house. In London, Playwright Williams himself played the gifted young miner, but could scarcely have done so with more understanding than Richard Waring exhibits in this production. As his temptress, Thelma Schnee is a remarkable blend of brat, slut and pathetic girlhood. Director Herman Shumlin, whose last success was The Male Animal, must also be credited with a heavy contribution to the Broadway dramatic season's first solid play.

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