New Play in Manhattan

Dream Girl (by Elmer Rice; produced by The Playwrights' Co.) is the season's first entertaining light comedy and the stage's first use of an entertaining light-comedy idea. Playwright Rice has examined a day in the life of young Georgina Allerton (Betty Field), a reckless, vast-repertoried daydreamer. A high-spirited little goose, Georgina is a chain-smoker of aromatic fantasies. She is far better at dramatizing than at understanding herself, and has a bit of trouble sorting out the men in her life.

There is a married book-jobber who is useful for visions of glamorous sinning but not much else. There is her arty boob of a brother-in-law, whom she thinks she loves. There is a gay bully of a newspaperman, whom she thinks she hates. But after dinner, theater and a midnight drive with the Press, hate turns to love.

Alternating Georgina's mental balloon ascensions (murderess on trial for her life, high-minded mother of twins, poison-swallowing streetwalker, emergency Portia triumphing in The Merchant of Venice) with her muddled, mundane romances, Dream Girl shoots at nothing much higher than fun. For the first third of Georgina's day, it shoots pretty wide of the mark, is more forced than funny. But once it gets going, it spins merrily along.

In one of the longest roles on record, crammed with quick-changes of costume and quicker ones of character, Actress Field (in private life, Mrs. Elmer Rice) shows astonishing verve and versatility. Only a step or two behind her in skill is Wendell Corey as the newspaperman. Not the least entertaining part of Dream Girl is its ingenious stagecraft: three sliding platforms on which Stage Designer Jo Mielziner has mounted all sorts of stylish and witty little sets, using normal lighting for Georgina's real life, a blue spot for her trances.

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With his Dream Girl sets, boyish, 44-year-old Jo Mielziner (pronounced Mell-zeener) completed his 150th Broadway assignment. Since he first caught the public's eye in 1924 with his sets for The Guardsman, he has designed such varied productions as Strange Interlude, Street Scene, The Barretts of Wimpole Street, the Katharine Cornell Romeo and Juliet, the Gielgud Hamlet, Winterset, Watch on the Rhine, The Glass Menagerie, Carousel. Most theatergoers today, asked to name a stage designer, and most producers out to hire one, would think first of Mielziner.

The answer lies in Mielziner's versatility, resourcefulness, taste, feeling for detail. He may not have the creative power of such an old master as Robert Edmond Jones, the freshness of up-&-coming George Jenkins, the occasional witty elegance of Howard Bay. But he is seldom commonplace. To Writer Djuna Barnes his unique gift is "to lay age upon his settings," give them "a rich patina of occupancy."

Hurry, Hurry. Mielziner's greatest headache--and heartache--is the frantic haste with which he must fill his jobs. The scene designer has perhaps three days to work out his design, perhaps three weeks to make hundreds of sketches, find dozens of props, discard, replace, assemble, "hang" and light. "I like to brood," sighs Mielziner, "and there's no time for brooding"--only 100-hour work weeks in which "one minute you're creating magic, the next minute you find yourself serving as a practical plumber or making a four-ton set disappear."

Mielziner employs only two assistants, shies away from the mass production possible to a highly sought-after designer. "I could enlarge my office," he once said, "hire 50 men, and become a millionaire, but I'd simply sicken myself with grouse and good port, and die of shame." Compared to most theater emoluments, designers' fees, which must cover designers' expenses, are not imposing. Mielziner's $3,500 for Dream Girl is about tops for a nonmusical; his $5,000 for Carousel, tops for a musical; the $30,000 that Mielziner grosses in a big year, tops for the profession.

An American portrait painter's son, Mielziner was born and brought up in Paris, spoke French till he was ten. He himseif studied to be a painter, switched to stage designing partly because he was mad about the theater, partly to be sure of an income. Says he: "I've never been sorry," pointing meanwhile with an artist's pride to the prices and praise his stage drawings have fetched.

A marine in World War I, Mielziner served for three years in World War II doing camouflage for the Army Air Forces. It proved an interesting reversal of roles. "On the stage my job was to make people grasp a situation as quickly as possible. In camouflage, my job was to keep them from grasping it at all."

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