New Plays in Manhattan

The Deep Blue Sea (by Terence Rattigan) has seldom given off a fishier smell. Rattigan has tackled a grim moment in a woman's life, and has striven manfully to make a big afternoon of it for large audiences of other, less unfortunate women. Margaret Sullavan has returned to Broadway to play the bedeviled lady who twice turns on the gas, but who has no better luck at dying than (until the last few minutes) at making a go of life.

Bedeviled Actress Sullavan assuredly is: for love, she has left her high-placed dullard of a husband, only to find that her cheap, shallow, pleasure-seeking lover is about to walk out on her. Hers being an intense nature and a desperate passion, she can neither face her lover's desertion nor about-face into her husband's arms. It is a situation where the circumstances are shoddy, and only the consequences tragic.

Playwright Rattigan is not such a hack as to brush aside the serious point of his story; rather, he responds just enough to betray it. Far more theater man than playwright, he has a way, whether with a scene's falling apart or a character's fate, of being saved by the bell -- by someone on the phone or someone at the door. He seems less to chronicle suffering than to exploit it. But he respects the rules, he scrupulously obeys the sign reading No Unhappiness Permitted After 10:45 p.m., even if it entails the most false and banal of endings.

Margaret Sullavan, though uneven, brings far more integrity to the playing of Hester Collyer than Rattigan does to the part. The expert Alan Webb is floored as the husband; as the playboy, James Hanley comes off much better in the play's best role. As somebody who would love and cherish Hester if he could, he perhaps reflects something in Rattigan himself. Rattigan seems not so much unwilling to do right by his material as incapable.

The Climate of Eden (adapted by Moss Hart from Edgar Mittelholzer's novel Shadows Move Among Them) is unusual in itself and more unusual for Moss Hart. This time Hart is neither sandpapering comedy gags nor polishing dramatic commonplaces. He has been lured to the jungle of British Guiana, where an odd kind of missionary lives with his odd kind of family, and where there arrives, shell-shocked by civilization, a tense and neurotic English nephew.

The missionary (John Cromwell) offers his own special version of God and the good life, which includes nude bathing, trial marriage, and the telling of thrillers in church. His houseful of children have a maximum of impulses and a minimum of inhibitions. The main story concerns the effect of all this on the visitor. Gregory Hawke (Lee Montague) had hated his wife from being constantly unfaithful to her; and she had committed suicide for love of him. Only slowly, through a new life in this climate of Eden and a new love (attractive Rosemary Harris), can he be healed.

Seldom has more exotically flavored fruit dropped off the tree of the knowledge of good & evil. The odd thing is that it hasn't a more satisfying taste. Well staged by Mr. Hart and obviously written with seriousness and care, Climate has interesting scenes and characters, striking turns of behavior and speech. One reason for its lack of sustained interest may be that it tackles too much for one evening--a family, a community, a philosophy, a man's rehabilitation, a girl's turning a corner into adolescence. A weightier reason may be that Climate demands literary rather than dramatic treatment; the story needs style to lace it together, and a prevailingly comic stance. Equally, without the attendant irony of Mittelholzer's book, there emerges too sentimental a back-to-nature philosophy, too pretty a cure. After all, despite its climate, Eden racked up quite a tally of disobedience, sin and crime.

In any case, the book resists transplantation in the theater much as did a somewhat comparable one, The Innocent Voyage. Climate fleetingly rates such adjectives as fresh, vivid or taut. The trouble is that they just come & go where they should meet and join hands.

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