Condemned to Broadway

Many plays achieve Broadway, but few have Broadway thrust upon them. Alfred Hayes's The Girl on the Via Flaminia was successful at Greenwich Village's Circle in the Square, when out of the blue the arena-type playhouse was closed as a firetrap. Finding no other Village theater available, the producers last week reluctantly moved The Girl to Broadway.

Fortunately, it can feel at home there. Adapted from Playwright Hayes's novel, it tells of life in Rome just after the 1944 liberation, when, for impoverished Italians, liberation also spelled defeat, and Allied soldiers were resented as pocket-jingling conquerors. The play tells in particular of a G.I. and an Italian girl (Leo Penn and Betty Miller) who come together because he is lonely and she is hungry, and share a room pretending to be husband and wife. Theirs is no wartime idyl; the girl loathes her role and denounces the man with a full G.I. bill of wrongs. He--decent, perplexed, finally irritated--cannot mend matters.

Like many dramatizations, the play is episodic and uneven. But much of the writing has a quick, lashing force. The best episodes are both harsh and compassionate; and the character of the girl--both as written and played--has a tragic truthfulness.

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