New Repertory in Manhattan

Repertory Manhattan last week greeted its first large-scale repertory theater since Eva Le Gallienne's famed enterprise folded in 1933. This time Miss Le Gallienne was again a leading spirit, but in partnership with Director Margaret Webster (Hamlet, Othello) and Producer Cheryl Craw ford (Porgy and Bess, The Tempest). It had taken the three of them two years to raise almost $300,000 from 144 stockholders (they resisted Hollywood) and to gather a permanent company, including Walter Hampden, Victor Jory, Ernest Truex and Actress Le Gallienne herself.

But when the American Repertory Theater got going last week with Shakespeare's Henry VIII* and Barrie's What Every Woman Knows, it was all set for at least two years.

Its first two choices could hardly be called exciting:

Henry Vlll follows history fairly faithfully only to leave drama at a distance. Though Henry is the cause of all the action, he never seems the center of the play; and its interest wobbles between the just deserts visited on that "proud, bad man," the ambitious Cardinal Wolsey, and the unjust deserts visited on that proud, good woman whom Henry cast aside for Anne Boleyn--Katherine of Aragon.

Shrewdly cut and staged by Margaret Webster and handsomely mounted by David Ffolkes, last week's Henry held up as storytelling and scored as pageantry. But it took on no added drama with Walter Hampden a stately cipher in Wolsey's role, Victor Jory messing up the

King's, and Miss Le Gallienne vigorously misinterpreting Katherine's.

What Every Woman Knows proves a decided contrast to Henry. Barrie's rather faded comedy of the great hidden role wives play in their husbands' careers remains a sort of unfading matinee attraction. It is cleverly "human" without being even slightly real. Its little golden nugget of truth is heavily coated with all the familiar Barrie chemicals--romantic fancy, sentimental charm, playful humor, terrifying coyness and thick Scotch burr. And in creating plain Maggie Shand, whose wit and wisdom were the making of her priggish husband's fortune, Barrie was practicing all Maggie's guile on the opposite sex.

What Every Woman Knows still has pleasant and amusing scenes along with irritating ones and a few the moths have been at. Last week's production suffered most from the inadequate, unwinning Maggie of Hollywood's June Duprez, gained most from the keenly humorless John Shand of Richard Waring.

* Actually John Fletcher (of Beaumont & Fletcher fame) and perhaps Philip Massinger (A New Way to Pay Old Debts) had as great a hand in Henry VIII as Shakespeare.

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