New Plays in Manhattan

The Shrike (by Joseph Kramm) is a scary blend of theatricalism and truth-- a case history of an intelligent man who, having attempted suicide, is brought to the psychiatric ward of a city hospital. Completely sane, he comes up against maddening institutional methods of both procedure and inquiry. And beyond his medical inquisitors, there is the wife he has deserted for another woman. Outwardly all devotion to the man who scorned her, she is viciously determined he shall not walk out of the hospital into any arms but her own. Half-crazed by the hospital's methods of therapy and by relationships in which it is the doctors who must not be antagonized, Jim Downs finally pretends love for his wife so as to be released into her custody--which means held permanently in her clutches. Hence the title; the shrike is a bird that impales its prey on thorns.

The Shrike is a relentless, gripping theater piece--one man's horror story that might easily be more than one man's fate. It is a tale of doors closing, one by one, until a door opens at the end--upon the outskirts of hell. Even its chief flaw as playwriting--it slightly scrambles the picture of an institution with the predicament of a man--enhances it as theater.

The documentary method proves a drawback because, far more than imaginative drama, documents exist to be scrutinized. On a factual basis, it is improbable that hospital psychiatrists, however literal-minded, would to a man misread both Jim and his wife. Documents can also get flat-toned, but, thanks to the production, The Shrike very seldom does. Jose Ferrer acts Jim Downs with wonderful quiet skill. Equally distinguished is his staging of the play, with its large, hand-picked cast that includes Judith Evelyn in the tough role of the wife. Powerful enough to raise goose pimples, The Shrike is yet plausible enough to raise a few questions about city hospitals.

Fancy Meeting You Again (by George S. Kaufman and Leueen MacGrath) are the right words for what the audience felt about the play. Fancy fell back on reincarnation as a basis for farce, and told of a sculptress and an art critic who--after all sorts of meetings and matings, B.C. and A.D.--finally meet and marry in 1952. The play, which promptly closed, had only some scattered Kaufman wit to recommend it. A banal farce, it made the even worse mistake of being an altogether brassy fantasy that wisecracked wide open, hours before the end.

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