New Plays in Manhattan

The Hallams (by Rose Franken; produced by William Brown Meloney) are the same Manhattan family that Playwright Franken wrote about, 16 years ago, in Another Language. Most of them are now distinctly middleaged, almost all of them still invincibly middleclass. Doughty Grandma Hallam (well played by Ethel Grimes) still trumpets the glories and responsibilities of the Hallams' name, still tries to keep them all together--and all of them under her thumb.

But for all Grandma's efforts, there are small--and even large--defiances and disasters (a granddaughter coolly marries outside the faith and a tuberculous grandson pays for a happy but imprudent marriage with his life).

Playwright Franken has a pretty good eye for all the detail of middle-class family life--the rich son, the poor son; the huffiness and stuffiness; the furnishings and food. But anything in The Hallams that isn't made of velvet or mahogany seems made of cardboard. Whenever the play abandons the household for the heart, whenever it exchanges class or clan reactions for personal emotions, it becomes feeble, trite or depressingly empty.

The Linden Tree (by J. B. Priestley; produced by Maurice Evans) has been running in London for seven months. On Broadway last week it folded after seven performances.

Playwright Priestley had used an English professor and his family for a symbolic blueprint of contemporary England. The professor's wife wants to break with provincial university life; one daughter seeks salvation in science, another in religion; a son can see no salvation in anything, and has turned cynically to -L-.s.d. To the professor, the best thing for a country that has its back to the wall is to put its shoulder to the wheel. But nobody listens much to the professor (likably, gently played by Cinemenace Boris Karloff). Nor on Broadway did anybody listen much to Mr. Priestley. England, being itself the hero of The Linden Tree, would understandably give it a hearing. But simply as playwriting it is talky and lifeless.

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