New Play in Manhattan

Middle of the Night is TV-and-movie-famed Paddy (Marty) Chayefsky's first Broadway play, and Cinemactor Edward G. Robinson's first Broadway appearance since 1930. The result is disappointing.

The fault is not Robinson's. As Jerry Kingsley, a well-to-do. 53-year-old widower who falls in love with a girl of 24 (Gena Rowlands), Robinson is neither cinematic nor Little-Caesarish. He plays with feeling and skill. Age-conscious to begin with, made brutally aware of the perils of marriage as he proceeds, he is ruefully realistic, but always with an ear cocked for romance. The part comes off; the play does not.

To begin with, Playwright Chayefsky's forte is not the idyls of the Kingsleys but the annals of doggedly ordinary folk. Given a handful of lower-middle or too-recently-upper-middle class people, and he will envelop them in a fine steam bath of banalities, in strong but clotted family feelings. Given a really sharp situation, such as Jerry's family met in a conclave over his possible marriage, and Chayefsky can orchestrate it--and Joshua Logan conduct it--with precise, phonographic humor. But the strong point of the playwright becomes the weak point of the play: the small talk and small talkers seem mere padding that not so much interrupts a vibrant story as substitutes for one.

And a vibrant story is called for, since Middle of the Night is less a tale of December and May than of December and March. The stormy, immature, unhappily married heroine is a full-fledged neurotic, so that Middle of the Night concerns a problem personality as well as a problem marriage. And for something so complex, Playwright Chayefsky lacks both the capacity and the concentration; his play trades in banalities more pretentious than any it chronicles. It lists characters in the program as The Girl, The Kid Sister, The Manufacturer; it does not list scene changes but flashes them on a movie screen; it inserts needless incidental music. And there is the sudden happy ending--ascribable, perhaps, to reckless optimism on the lovers' part, but more easily to commercial pessimism on the author's about harsher endings.

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