Old Plays In Manhattan

The Male Animal (by James Thurber & Elliott Nugent) got the spring season at Manhattan's City Center* off to a very happy start. For what was never much of a play, The Male Animal seems, after twelve years, remarkably engaging entertainment. In chronicling the academic and domestic woes of a mild-mannered English professor, Nugent kept the stagecraft under enough control for Thurber to make all else seem delightfully muddled and periodically mad.

Trouble starts for the professor when he wants to read one of Vanzetti's letters to his class: a reactionary trustee sniffs redness in his politics. Trouble mounts when his wife's old football-playing beau turns up, and the professor feels forced to show the redness in his blood. With liquor for a weapon, the male animal slays the Milquetoast in him; and in a very funny drunk scene, he elects to hold his mate--as swans and bull elephants do --by fighting for her. He does hold her--if only because the football player couldn't be more anxious to let her go.

As domestic comedy, The Male Animal snapshots some familiar poses, strikes some reminiscent chords. Elliott Nugent plays the professor as winningly as he did twelve years ago, Martha Scott is helpful as his wife, and Cinemactor Robert Preston is fine as the just short of half-witted onetime halfback. But what raises the play a full notch or more is its infectious nonsense. It sufficiently portrays the male animal in relation to the female, but it exhibits him even more as a leading specimen in the cosmic zoo.

Much Ado About Nothing is one of

Shakespeare's maturer comedies, boasting perhaps his most modern-style pair of lovers. Benedick'and Beatrice are no pastoral swain and sweetheart, no parties to Shakespeare's pet formula of Boy Turns Into Girl. Theirs is a lively sniping contest full of sophisticated scorn; they are as pert, as mocking, as hoity-toity--though by no means as hardhearted--as a Restoration gallant and belle. And the trick that is played on them--of causing each to overhear how the other adores him--still has laughter in it.

Done right, Beatrice and Benedick can carry off a play that Shakespeare didn't always do right by. But last week's production, which closed after four performances/- completely lacked spin and sparkle. Claire Luce played Beatrice as officiously and coyly as an old maid who has just announced her engagement; Antony Eustrel's Benedick was all O-what-a-gay-dog-am-I. And under Eustrel's direction, the rest of the play offered such tripping and gurgling and spouting as today are banned from high-school auditoriums.

* Plays to come: Tovarick, First Lady.

/-The week saw a worse casualty: a farce called Hook 'n Ladder had a run of one night.

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