New Plays in Manhattan

The Deep Mrs. Sykes (by George Kelly; produced by Stanley Gilkey & Barbara Payne) is the first play in nearly a decade by the man who left his imprint on the 1920s with The Torch Bearers, The Show-Off, Craig's Wife. The Deep Mrs. Sykes is not their equal. It is a little too talky, too thin, too pat. But it asserts its theatrical independence at every turn, it makes grown-up assumptions, and the best of it seems written with a rapier rather than a pen.

Beginning with a middle-aged matron and a bit of perplexing gossip, The Deep Mrs. Sykes ends by revealing the key dislocations in half a dozen lives. For all her inscrutable airs and vaunted "intuitions," Carrie Sykes (Catherine Willard) is just a stupid mischief-maker and egoist. When a woman in her cups spills the story that someone has been anonymously sending flowers to a neighborhood bride, Carrie suspects her own husband (Neil Hamilton), but lets the intoxicated woman--who goes haywire with jealousy--imagine it is hers. Actually it is Mrs. Sykes's married son--and gradually there opens up a group picture of tangled lives and one-sided marriages.

Playwright Kelly is no punch-puller--and no knight of chivalry. In The Deep Mrs. Sykes he brings down the whip, with a kind of cold fury, on the whole "female" nature. Yet he carefully digs beneath behavior for motive, explains Mrs. Sykes as well as excoriates her. In fact, he explains everybody--a virtue that winds up as a kind of fault, because the play resorts to outside enlightenment rather than selfrevelation; it tells rather than shows. The result is more like a solved cryptogram than a thing of flesh & blood. But, if not a satisfying experience, The Deep Mrs. Sykes, with its verbal claws and vivid theater, is very often a stimulating one.

The Author. The most inward of men and fastidious of playwrights, tall, fiftyish George Kelly oddly enough first won fame as a vaudeville actor. Totally lacking in ambition to write, he got started by writing his own vaudeville material.

Kelly's pen was sharp from the first, but as time went on he dipped it into ever darker ink. Manners gave place to morals, nose-tweaking to vivisection. Spoofing the Little-Theater Movement in The Torch Bearers, he harshly satirized a blustering

Babbitt in The Show-Off. In the Pulitzer-Prize-winning Craig's Wife he impaled a woman who put her house ahead of her husband; in Behold the Bridegroom he sentenced a girl who was guilty of amorous trifling to lose real love when she finally found it.

Some people would blame the relative artistic failure of Kelly's later plays (Mag gie the Magnificent, Philip Goes Forth, Reflected Glory) on his retreating too far from life. "I go out very little," he admits. And when he is working on a play, he is too preoccupied to enjoy being with people -- "It's like having a sick child at home." He has written little in recent years be cause he has not been too well himself. But besides Mrs. Sykes he has written another play: a love story called Where the Heart Is.

George v. Ethel. Kelly denies the fre quent charge that he is particularly vindictive about women. Women, he thinks, just make better play material than men because they are "more showy by nature." more challenging. But he doesn't let them off easily: "You say to the average man: 'I'll see you tomorrow at four'--and that's that. Women rattle on for ten minutes: 'If I'm not there, you can call Ethel, and I'll have left a message, or I'll let you know or maybe you better call me. . . .'"

After his plays became hits, Kelly wangled an unusual arrangement in Hollywood; he never had to appear at story conferences or follow a schedule, just phoned when he felt like doing a picture. Over the years he has made as much money as he wants. "I have no desire," he smiles, "to be the richest man in the graveyard.''

Kiss Them for Me (adapted by Luther Davis from Frederic Wakeman's Shore Leave; produced by John Moses & Mark Hanna) concerns three Pacific flyers who foozle a four-day leave in San Francisco. Wanting only women and liquor, they find themselves hounded into making speeches at war plants, herded into a hospital for physical exams. Then, worse yet, one of them is ordered grounded and another given his medical discharge. It takes a lot of doing to get themselves back to their outfits.

For a time, Kiss Them for Me is likable and lively. Better still, it faithfully conveys the mixed toughness and touchiness of fighting men, their impatience with civilian thinking and back-home ways. But, lacking any plot, Kiss Them for Me too soon rambles and repeats itself. And as the whole point of the play is that its heroes reflect a common psychology, there is naturally little contrast of character, and even less development. Running out of honest material toward the end, Kiss Them for Me vainly resorts to a few old theatrical dodges--including a Rover Boy windup.

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