New Plays in Manhattan

The Traveling Lady (by Horton Foote) is a small-sized drama by a "promising" playwright (The Chase, The Trip to Bountiful) who continues to fumble. But it raises to stardom a very gifted young actress who continues to grow. Kim Stanley (The Chase, Picnic) plays a bewildered, hard-beset young mother, not very bright but full of courage, married to a no-good weakling just out of jail and soon heading back to it. She plays the part with force and feeling and an eloquently detailed sense of character, and it's a pity that she is stranded by the play as well as in it.

Whatever credit Horton Foote earns as a playwright not for being a hack, he tends to forfeit from not being a craftsman. Writing of small town Texans, he gropes among their crotchets and habits and heartaches, and at his best achieves touching moments about touching characters. But, in general, he has a certain sense of the blundering mischance of life without knowing how to project it. All too often, he writes muddled scenes involving muddled people.

In The Traveling Lady some of the people even play muddled roles--parts that have only the most peripheral value or semi-farcical character. They pass and repass, moreover, among lighting effects that involve the approach of dusk or onset of night, or sound effects of offstage dance music and distant trains. Such mood props can be valuable when they supplement the right storytelling and speech; but in The Traveling Lady they are often merely sentimental substitutes for them. There is no drive or fiber to the play, but rather a curious sense of wordiness without any gift for words.

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Actress Kim Stanley, 29, belongs to a growing school of young stage people (Marlon Brando, Julie Harris, Geraldine Page) whose particular brand of acting is laughingly called The Method. There is seldom any eye-rolling madness in this methodism: the actor does not tear a passion to tatters. Instead, he digests the role slowly, bit by bit, until he feels that he is truly the personality he is portraying.

Kim, a native of New Mexico, has been practicing her style since 1949, when she began studying at the Actors Studio with Broadway Directors Elia (A Streetcar Named Desire) Kazan and Lee (Men in White) Strasberg, both of whom worked with the old Group Theater and became two of the ablest craftsmen to influence the U.S. stage. Television jobs and a few good on-and off-Broadway roles helped Kim along. Finally, as the homely, dry-tongued adolescent sister in Picnic (TIME, March 2, 1953), she won both the New York Drama Critics' and Donaldson awards as the year's best supporting actress.

Married to Actor-Director Curt Conway, Actress Stanley has a three-year-old daughter and a year-old son, commutes 40 miles to her home in Centerport, L.I. Now a full-fledged Broadway star--her name was shifted to the top of the marquee and billboards after the opening-night notices--she insists: "I don't feel any different. I still want to spend as much time as I can with my children. They need me a great deal, at their age."

The Rainmaker (by N. Richard Nash) produces a fair amount of good theatrical weather. Playwright Nash, author of the allegorical See the Jaguar, is still bewitched by symbolism but no longer groggy from it. This time he is so obvious that a retarded matinee audience can see the point. When he isn't being florid, in thought or language, he can be very good fun. The Rainmaker is about equal parts sticky romance and lively comedy, crumpled cornflowers and high-grade corn.

The action takes place, some time around the '20s, on a western farm during a drought. The play starts off, like Barrie's What Every Woman Knows, with the efforts of a plain girl's father and brothers to find her a husband. Lizzie is all the wrong things--uncoy, intelligent, blunt; failure unnerves her; and she is bleakly staring spinsterhood in the face when a posturing, flamboyant young con man (Darren McGavin) blusters in, swearing that for $100 he can bring rain. With the money in his jeans, he spouts philosophy, poetizes, woos the girl, teaches her to have faith in herself. By the time he rides off to make a new pitch, she is well on her way--with another beau--to the altar.

Probably the only thing wrong with The Rainmaker is the rainmaker. When Playwright Nash is chronicling the family affairs of the Currys--the amours of a lively young oaf, the wrangles and tangles over getting Lizzie hitched--or when Lizzie herself mimics the wiles of the gals who know how to lasso men, the play has a brisk air and an engagingly humorous smack. And as Lizzie, Geraldine Page plays with charm and verve, and exhibits an unexpected comic gusto. It is popular stuff, and deservedly popular.

But then the rainmaker appears; and after him, indeed, the deluge. As a symbol--as a transformer of lives and a spokesman for faith rather than mere facts--he seems out of the dead past of playwriting. As a romantic swashbuckler, given to fancy rainmaking and fancier lovemaking, he lacks lure: his philosophizings are an intrusion and his love scenes somehow an offense. He may save the crops but he decidedly mars the play.

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