New Play in Manhattan

Years Ago (by Ruth Gordon; produced by Max Gordon) floats nostalgically back to Wollaston, Mass, in 1912, when Playwright Gordon was 16-year-old Ruth Gordon Jones and dying to go on the stage. In the story sense, the play simply tells how Ruth got her father to let her. But atmospherically, Years Ago catches the color of respectable, scrimping family life, and that sentimental warmth that can make any previous age seem like the Era of Good Feeling.

Ruth (Patricia Kirkland) sang the music of The Pink Lady, secretly bombarded actresses with letters, tried for a job with a Boston stock company. But her father (Fredric March) wanted her to teach physical education, and her father was a formidable man. It needed all Ruth's courage, plus a push from her sympathetic mother (Florence Eldridge), to confess her hopes to this quick-tempered old bear who growled at everything from churches to telephones. But Father heard Ruth out with surprising calm--he sensed her tenaciousness if not her talent; and in the end he let her go to New York to try her luck.

Ruth Gordon as a playwright, like her mother before her as a housewife, has to make a little bit go a long way. Years Ago is moseying and uneventful, and its curtains sometimes come down because there is absolutely nothing left to keep them up. But in its mild fashion, it is pleasant enough; it is streaked with humor and period detail, and buoyed up by a good production. And it shrewdly keeps to the popular formula of playing up all the crotchets and toning down all the real collisions of family life; of being not so much true or false as merely picturesque.

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