New Plays in Manhattan

Letters to Lucerne (by Fritz Rotter & Allen Vincent; produced by Dwight Deere Wiman). War, via letters from home, comes to a small Swiss boarding school, peopled with girls of many nationalities. The junior misses, the most attractive part of the play (see p. 54), are nice but inadequate when they try to cope with worldwide catastrophe.

Brooklyn, U.S.A. (by John Bright & Asa Bordages; produced by Bern Bernard & Lionel Stander). The Brooklyn "businessmen" who operated as Murder Inc. here return unsoftened and undisguised. No hopped-up killer-diller, Brooklyn, U.S.A. is as tough, cold-blooded and obscene as the rats who are its characters. A fast two-man job with an ice pick in a barbershop creates more horror, carries more conviction than Hollywood's slickest thrill-mongering. But once the D.A. gets the mobsters on the run, the play loses its fascinating documentary flavor, becomes just another melodrama.

Clash by Night (by Clifford Odets; produced by Billy Rose). The husband, the lodger, the dissatisfied wife, turn up once again, to provide the season's biggest disappointment--a play by Odets with Tallulah Bankhead as star. As the wife, Tallulah has her fine sultry and tigerish moments, but seems out of her milieu--much more like the daughter of the late Speaker of the House of Representatives than the wife of a bohunk.

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