New Play in Manhattan

King of Hearts (by Jean Kerr & Eleanor Brooke) sends up a shower of witty sparks over a rather flat and meager landscape. A satiric farce, it concerns a megalomaniac cartoonist (Donald Cook) who regards his comic strips as profounder than the Wise Books of the East, and himself as a sort of Einstein with sex appeal. He is exhibited in varied but always-voluble relation to an assistant (Jackie Cooper), an interviewer, a syndicate chief (David Lewis), a small boy he adopts (Rex Thompson) and a fiancee (Cloris Leachman) whose romantic eyes are opened by, among other things, his not knowing what color they are.

The playwrights have riddled their cartoonist with his own pompous, high-sounding cliches and then left him bleeding on their verbal barbed wire. King of Hearts boasts some of the funniest dialogue of the season and some fast punches to all the more inflated regions of the human anatomy. It also boasts--thanks to Walter F. Kerr's direction and the acting of a superior cast--a lively production.

The minor weakness of King of Hearts is that its cracks come with a slightly too metallic and rat-tat-tat regularity. The more serious weakness is that what little story there is should additionally--in a play that makes mincemeat of cliches--use so many plot cliches itself. Where the wit is so true and the satire so topical, it seems a pity that such sharp pins should jab, in the end, little more than a pincushion.

Playwright Jean Kerr, 30, with her husband Walter, 40, the New York Herald Tribune'?, drama critic, wrote the 1949 revue, Touch and Go. This season she contributed two sprightly sketches to John Murray Anderson's Almanac. A tall brunette with a gift of gag, she has a pretty, animated face and four small boys (aged one to eight) who are animated all over.

Most of her work on King of Hearts was done in the family car, parked along the side streets near her home in New Rochelle, N.Y. "I have to get out of the house to work," she says. "I can't think there, what with one thing and another happening on the domestic front--the maid coming in for advice, the kids running in. I'm always easily distracted."

Much of the original material for King of Hearts came from Mrs. Eleanor Brooke, a Washington, D.C. housewife, who, as Jean had been earlier, was a graduate student in Walter Kerr's drama class at Washington's Catholic University in 1948. Mrs. Brooke collected a vast pile of research and turned it into a lengthy character sketch of an egomaniac. Working on and off in her mobile office, Jean invented additional characters and material and built the play in six months.

Now that King of Hearts is a hit, Playwright Kerr and Director Kerr are relieved, even though Critic Kerr's colleagues were almost as unanimous with their criticism ("weak plot") as with their praise. Kerr, a quiet-spoken man, feels it will take some time before he can be objective, as a critic, about the play he directed. "Right now," he says, "I'm being a deliberate schizophrenic." Jean is more exuberant. "Walter," she says fondly, "is just naturally a lump."

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