New Plays in Manhattan

Flight into Egypt (by George Tabori) is full of harsh subject matter that at times makes harrowing theater. But the subject matters infinitely less than it might, partly because Playwright Tabori never determines just what it is, partly because he never discovers quite where to stop. Writing of an Austrian refugee family bogged down in Cairo while trying to reach the U.S., he cannot separate foreground from background, or circumstance from fate.

Franz and Lili Engel, with their little son Bubi, fled Vienna after their shop was bombed, and Franz had spent months in Buchenwald. In a corrupt and decadent Cairo they live in desperate debt, with Franz confined to a wheelchair and Lili enduring insults and dishonor to make ends meet. A fellow Austrian urges them to go back to Vienna. But just then their U.S. visas come through--only for the consulate's doctor to find that Franz' condition, despite his heroic efforts to hide it, is hopeless. Only by swallowing poison can he set his wife and Bubi free.

In tense moments of writing, in individual scenes, Flight into Egypt becomes vivid and even terrifying. Elia Kazan's direction is forceful, and as the suffering husband & wife, Paul Lukas and Gusti Huber give fine, telling performances. But the play falls far short of significant drama. It clearly concerns not just the plight of refugees, but the question of their always being foreigners, and the corruption that menaces them in a foreign land. Yet even while it interlaces these three themes, the play at bottom rests on none of them; at bottom it is pure domestic drama--the anguished struggle of a wife to shield a proud, helpless husband and to support him and their child.

Just as he chokes his story with too many themes, Tabori ultimately deadens it with too much theater. His endless sharp incidents and episodes are "a little like the bumps and blasts of air encountered in amusement-park Funlands; he breaks up into mere sensations what should build up into a sustained experience.

One Bright Day (by Sigmund Miller) is a briskly mediocre rehandling of a classical dilemma. The dilemma, most memorably set forth in Ibsen's An Enemy of the People, is the one between integrity and self-interest when a source of revenue becomes a source of public danger. In the present case, what shall a drug manufacturer do when he learns that under certain circumstances his chief product is harmful and even fatal? After all, not just his own livelihood is at stake, but that of his associates, his employees, the town itself. Before Julian Prescott (well played by Howard Lindsay) comes to a decision, there is much airing of opinions and a fair amount of melodrama.

Were One Bright Day a novel, the exact word for it would be "readable." The audience is always interested in what will happen next, and apathetic to the whole thing next morning. Playwright Miller has carefully appraised his theme for what it is worth as theater. He has decided just how much humor may prove of use; has decided, less soundly, just how much romance; and has got his play a nice smooth production. He is more shrewd than gifted; and not the first playwright who, while dramatizing the cleavage between ethics and economics on the stage, has managed to combine them at the work table.

The Long Watch (by Harvey Haislip) would seem almost deliberately meant to bore were it not so glaringly designed to please. A wartime story about the WAVES, it is for half the way a prankish comedy, then abruptly swings over to melodrama. The melodrama turns on a WAVE who falls asleep while on duty. The first-night critics proved to be of sterner stuff.

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