Old Plays in Manhattan

The Green Pastures (by Marc Connelly; suggested by Roark Bradford's Ol' Man Adam an' His Chillun; produced by the Wigreen Company in association with Harry Fromkes) still has an appeal after 21 years. Once again a set of Bible stories, as they appear to a Negro preacher conducting a Southern Sunday-school class, is made living and bright on the stage. The Green Pastures has a storybook simplicity, a picture-book vividness. It has the folk imagination's ability to recreate in its own image, to animate with its own sufferings, to interpret with its own morality. Now & then, with a homely detail, it contrives an awesome effect; or with an incongruous touch reveals an unexpected meaning. Everything is most unmystically concrete: Heaven is a Southern fish fry, Babylon is a honkytonk.

There is a sly humor in such episodes as that of Noah and the Flood; a piquant realism to making the headquarters of the Lord a sleepy, small-town office. The best performances--such as Ossie Davis' as Gabriel--have an easy charm, and the best of Robert Edmond Jones's sets have a clean, morning freshness. And the Hall Johnson Choir strikes a resonant note with its singing of the spirituals.

To the towering role of De Lawd, 27-year-old William Marshall brings physical Tightness and a proper dignity, but not the stature of the late William B. Harrison, and not the grandeur demanded by the part. The play itself, being highly episodic, can hardly avoid being uneven; and along with folk touches that seem genuine and fresh, go some that seem slick and laid on. But The Green Pastures in general is a stage piece that derives its vitality from something more far-reaching than the stage.

Springtime for Henry (by Benn W. Levy; produced by Harald Bromley & George Brandt in association with Richard Doscher) has been darn near a lifetime for Edward Everett Horton. Having played it just about everywhere else in the U.S. for the past 18 years, he began playing it last week on Broadway. To Broadway, which found five years long enough for Oklahoma!, those 18 years seemed either a miracle or a misprint. Not that the idea of the play--which inverts a copybook moral--isn't amusing enough. Henry Dewlip begins as a rakish, well-adjusted bachelor, is misled into sowing his tame oats, and then happily restored to rakishness.

There are some good lines and scenes. But Springtime for Henry is at best a small, ironic British farce. It can't avoid being thin, but as now performed it also seems too cute. Where it should be as dry as a Martini, it is often as whimsical as A. A. Milne. Henry, who began as a mere part for Horton, is by now a part of him. He manages it well in a broad, mugging way; but it is not always a part of Springtime for Henry.

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