New Play in Manhattan

Two Blind Mice (by Samuel Spewack; produced by Archer King & Harrison Woodhull) launches a highly farcical broadside against Washington bureaucracy. The scene is the Office of Medicinal Herbs--a bureau which has been legally abolished about five years before the curtain rises. But, by some paperwork slipup, it was never actually killed off. Two old ladies (well played by Mabel Paige and Laura Pierpont) are still puttering about in it, carefully burning their paychecks and, for income, renting department space to a rumba teacher and a pants-presser. When a prankish newspaperman (played with aplomb by Melvyn Douglas) stumbles on this setup, he proceeds to set it up in style, hoaxes Army, Navy and State Department into imagining that it is big hush-hush stuff, involved in herbal warfare.

In approach, Two Blind Mice is far more insane than incisive; in essence, it is standard farcical canned goods. Exceedingly amusing in spots, it is also exceedingly spotty. The point about the kind of yarn Playwright Spewack spins is that it must never stop spinning; its pace is its fortune. If it slows up, or even begins to make sense, it has trouble.

Two Blind Mice has trouble, by leaning heavily on that shakiest of farce props, the telephone; by including that flattest of farce ingredients, a love story; by having to face that grimmest of farce demands, unscrambling the joke. And the joke itself makes a better joke than it does a three-act play.

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