New Plays in Manhattan

Point of No Return (adapted by Paul Osborn from J. P. Marquand's novel) is a sure smash hit. Yet it is a hit at the expense of being a good play. Most of the Marquand virtues are discernible, but in Paul Osborn's version they are doled out in the smallest of small change. The whole thing has a smart, professional veneer, but it has no real psychological or satiric impact.

The play centers on a crisis in the life of rising Manhattan Banker Charles Gray --on whether he will be made a vice president of the bank. A success story that is really a price-of-success story, it is the saga of a normally ambitious young executive's normal amount of climbing, conforming and currying favor. And the question is not just whether the goal is worth the scramble, but whether--even with the goal in sight--Charles mightn't be happier by not attaining it.

For the first act, while the scene is set, Point of No Return is a deft genre study of life among the up & coming, rich with the telling samples of behavior, the satiric touches, social nuances, domestic details that Marquand is master of. For all three acts, Point of No Return is a generally deft production: pleasant staging, neat Jo Mielziner sets, enjoyable acting by Henry Fonda as Charles, by Leora Dana, John Cromwell, Frank Conroy, Robert Ross. Theater-wise, much of the play couldn't be smoother.

But it is theater-wise and drama-foolish. Necessarily lacking the fullness of the book, it much less excusably lacks the bite. The second act is an overlong flashback that reduces Charles's whole past to a magazine-fiction romance without appreciably illuminating the present. The third act is just an exercise in suspense over whether Charles will be made vice president.

More even than it suffers from being dieted to fit the stage, Point of No Return is hurt by a want of the book's wry irony, a failure to pose the dilemma that agitates Marquand himself quite as much as any other U.S. male. The play does not sufficiently cut two ways because Charles never seems sufficiently pulled two ways, never really seems involved in a fight against a job, only in a fierce struggle for one. And --a touch not in the book--if Charles's turndown of a fancy country-club bid is meant to show his independence, it only shows the play's lack of it. Charles must be made as "sympathetic" as possible: where material success is concerned, Point of No Return has none of its hero's misgivings.

Lo and Behold (by John Patrick) is a dull bit of shenanigans dusted with funny remarks. It introduces an elderly writer--celebrated, cynical, sick--who, after arranging to try to communicate with his doctor after death, lets a brand-new maid cook a meal that will kill him. Dead in a jiffy, he turns ghost, is joined by the shades of an Indian maiden, a Southern belle and a concert pianist. For two more acts, while the flesh & blood housemaid and doctor amble towards the altar, the four spirits aimlessly cavort about the stage.

As a story, Lo and Behold goes steadily downhill, from a mildly sophisticated fantasy to a shamelessly mechanical farce. As a play, it goes nowhere at all: dead and alive alike merely cruise the stage, and --worse yet--when traffic lights are green for one group, they are red for the other. The love story is fatuous, the writer (Leo Carroll) gets lost in the crowd; and though Playwright Patrick is more than capable of a funny line, his ghosts make anything but a funny lineup. Only the Indian, thanks to saw-voiced Doro Merande, succeeds.

The Grand Tour (by Elmer Rice) is like an off night at the movies. The first half is a tame travelogue about a school-marm's trip to Europe. The second half is nickelodeon stuff about the banker she falls in love with and his confession of embezzling. Not only is she willing, to marry him and share his disgrace, she would even give him back to the wife he loves better.

Top-heavy with literary references, the play started out merely as a blend of Rand McNally with the Five Foot Shelf. But The Grand Tour was easier to take with no plot at all than with the one it acquired. It closed after eight performances, an example of what happens when an established playwright won't face the fact that he has nothing to say.

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