New Play in Manhattan

Temper the Wind (by Edward Mabley & Leonard Mins; produced by Barnard Straus & Roland Haas) takes a stern look at postwar Germany. It is frankly polemical--a stage editorial dramatizing the dangers to peace that lurk within a defeated Germany, and the responsibilities that are fumbled and even selfishly flouted by Americans.

The people in Temper the Wind are a cross section of a Bavarian town, and not so much people as points of view. There is wily Industrialist Benckendorff (Reinhold Schunzel), who has played ball with the Nazis and now wants the Americans to let his closed machine-tool factory go full blast; there is his stiff-necked Prussian sister (Blanche Yurka), his still violently Nazi son-in-law (Tonio Selwart). There is Theodore Bruce (Walter Greaza), a visiting Chicago tycoon who, because business is business, would give Benckendorff cartel blanche; there are various indifferent, homesick American soldiers and officers; and there is Lieut. Colonel Woodruff (Thomas Beck), whose tough occupation job is to stabilize and denazify the Bavarian town.

Woodruff takes his job--and democracy --seriously; he is dedicated to the proposition that no German shall ever fight again.

When he learns that the executives in Benckendorff's factory are Nazis, he refuses to let it reopen. Benckendorff now gets Bruce to use pull, but Woodruff overrides him. Finally, Benckendorff has his son-in-law start a riot in the town, hoping it will bring about Woodruff's removal. But Woodruff quashes it and manages to keep the upper hand.

Temper the Wind is extremely uneven playwriting and not quite forceful enough theater. It has too many characters to keep it tidy or taut; its clash of viewpoints never quite boils up into drama; its culminating melodrama is clumsily handled and unexciting. But it remains an honest approach to a vital subject. And if it sounds sharp warnings, it offers no smug answers; it is evidence given in the witness box, rather than a resounding verdict handed down from the bench.

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