New Play in Manhattan

Four Winds (by Thomas W. Phipps) has to do with an immensely rich, exceedingly harassed, many-times-married heiress. All about her Palm Beach house are nest-featherers and heiress-fleecers: aunts and doctors and private secretaries, former and future husbands. The heiress herself is usually up and about by midafternoon, a sort of party-girl Ophelia given to the champagne shakes. Then a visiting poet takes her for a day in the sunshine and bids her go away and find herself.

Four Winds is rather like something by Noel Coward as adapted by a German moralist and retranslated into English. In a certain sense, through its own gift of tediousness and soggy small talk, it mirrors an expensively empty world. But its truths are the dreariest truisms, its gamut a mere shuttling between the plushy and the preachy. It gives no new wrinkle to the lowlifes in highlife. Only the jangled sharpness with which English Actress Ann Todd plays the heroine has any resonance; all else is a blur of echoes and a drone of words.

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