New Plays in Manhattan

Arsenic and Old Lace (by Joseph Kesselring, produced by Howard Lindsay & Russel Crouse) is absolutely top farce. A violently funny and batty murder play, it might be described, in the words of one of the cast, as what could be expected "if Strindberg had written Hellzapoppin."

The story concerns a family in which insanity not only runs but "fairly gallops." Two sweet Brooklyn spinsters (Josephine Hull & Jean Adair) have taken to putting lonely old men out of their loneliness with a compound of elderberry wine, arsenic, strychnine and cyanide, followed by Christian burial in the cellar. In these obsequies they have been assisted by a potty nephew (John Alexander) who regards himself as Teddy Roosevelt, the cellar as the Panama Canal, the bodies as yellow-fever victims, and the stairway to the second floor as San Juan Hill.

Another nephew (Allyn Joslyn) is an innocent dramatic critic engaged in a fine, sane courtship with the minister's daughter who lives next door. When she runs home for family prayers before going to the theatre with him, he reminds her that "if the prayer isn't too long I'd have time to lead you beside distilled waters." But that same evening he discovers the evidence of his aunts' latest charity in the window seat, awaiting burial. And that evening also marks the dreadful homecoming of a third nephew, an international killer, bringing with him the shady plastic surgeon who has disguised him to look just like Boris Karloff of the movies. The part is played by Boris Karloff. Making his Broadway debut, without any of his usual horrific face putty or false hair, he is every bit as sinister as he was in Frankenstein.

Loony, witty, timed to the split second, the rest of the show is punctuated with the preparation of surgical tortures, presidential statements and bugle blasts from Teddy Roosevelt, and the dark haulage of bodies. Even after the final curtain the fun continues--with a sidesplitting stage call which it would be unfair to the company to describe.

Playwright Joseph Kesselring, 39, got the idea for Arsenic and Old Lace by considering what would be the most unlikely thing his gentle grandmother might do. Born and raised in Manhattan, as a boy he sang at the Church of the Epiphany, went to Stuyvesant High School, taught at the Bethel Mennonite College in North Newton, Kans. He has acted on the road and in Chicago, has written pulp stories, vaudeville sketches, two Broadway flops. His press agent Richard Maney swears that Mr. Kesselring has recently lived on "herbs, wild berries and pemmican."

Eight O'Clock Tuesday (by Robert Wallsten & Mignon G. Eberhart, produced by Luther Greene & James Struthers) is a murder mystery so classic in style that almost everything in it seems to have happened somewhere before. Its only novelty is hardly startling--the events-leading-up-to are shown in a series of flash backs separated merely by the darkening of the stage. But Co-Author Eberhart, writer of many mystery novels, is an expert at keeping the murderer's secret, and mystery votaries probably won't object to the fact that the corpse was as sadistic a husband as ever threatened his wife with dark indecencies. Or that the suspects include his wife's lover, a butler and a doctor. Or that there is nothing that could be called comic relief. They probably won't even object to the fact that one of Broadway's best actresses, Pauline Lord, has no chance to prove her stature.

First Stop to Heaven (by Norman Rosten, produced by Margaret Hewes). It takes a first-class fantast, such as William Saroyan, to write a really diverting play about a crowd of freaks. The young poet who wrote First Stop to Heaven is as yet no Saroyan--though he has apparently sat under the master. He peoples a Manhattan rooming house with a postman who garbles Shakespeare, a long-haired WPA violinist who regards F. D. R. as his personal impresario, a ghostly old lady who distributes Father Coughlin's magazine Social Justice, a Socialistic Jewish razor-blade peddler, other Saroyanesque oddities. Despite such seasoned performers as bosomy Alison Skipworth and Taylor Holmes, their freaking, though frenzied, is very dull.

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