New Play in Manhattan

Mrs. McThing (by Mary Chase) reveals the author of Harvey in her accustomed whimsical mood. But though Mrs. Chase's fancy leaps, her stagecraft stumbles and shuffles; and though the playwright bangs about on a broomstick, what the play really needs is a broom.

Mrs. McThing tells of a rich woman (Helen Hayes) whose efforts to turn her young son (Brandon de Wilde) into Little Lord Fauntleroy have made him even more of a Peck's Bad Boy. With the help of a witch named Mrs. McThing, the son has been whisked to a dive operated by mobsters, and a perfect little gentleman has been substituted at home. Just when the mother finds out how much worse a too-good boy can be than a bad one, she finds out that the good boy is really not hers. She tracks hers down to the dive, only to discover that a substitute for herself now inhabits her mansion.

Mrs. McThing has plenty of wacky motivations and a fair number of funny moments. It pries open the mind and pleads the cause of childhood, and, by contrasting old-maid tea parties with raffish mobster quadrilles, pleads the cause of bohemia, too. It also lets Helen Hayes go on an expert binge of bit-part shenanigans.

But Mrs. McThing has the great fault of bohemia--the mussed look, the makeshift furnishings, the "interesting" but rather amateurish dinner that arrives several hours late. For, barring some salted nuts, it is not till Mrs. McThing is more than half over that any food for laughter begins to appear.

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