New Play in Manhattan

Janus (by Carolyn Green) calls for somewhat faint praise but need not be damned by it. A pleasant enough, light sex farce that brings an American touch of wackiness to a French-style exercise in sin, it concerns the wife of a shipping tycoon and the schoolmaster husband of a librarian. Each summer, while the tycoon is in South America and the librarian apparently buried in the stacks, their spouses put slipcovers over their morals and spend two secret months together in New York. United by authorship as well as ardor, they write bestsellers under the name of Janus. His flat is on the floor above hers; when she wants him, she bangs on the ceiling with a broom, and he sneaks down through the dumbwaiter. Then one day her husband sails in through the door.

By making all three act and react in agreeably unbourgeois fashion, Playwright Green whips the situation into a nice comic froth. Then an Internal Revenue man arrives, finds that secret joint authorship leads to curious joint tax returns, and stirs up some fiscal commotion. After that, though in a rather graceful way, Janus goes downhill.

If never the least bit brilliant, the play is never just silly or frantic either. What is perhaps nicest about it is its prevailingly playful tone. What is weakest is its dialogue, which is too seldom really bright and too often near-neighbor to the gag. Fortunately, a number of lines that were not born witty achieve a certain wit through the adroitness of the cast. Margaret Sullavan, Claude Dauphin, and Robert Preston as the tycoon, lend a certain airy charm, provide a certain steady carbonation.

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