New Play in Manhattan

Sunrise at Campobello (by Dore Schary) extends from Aug. 10, 1921 to June 26, 1924--from the day that Franklin Delano Roosevelt was stricken with polio to the moment when he rose, at the Democratic National Convention in Madison Square Garden, to nominate Al Smith for President. The interval between represents a catastrophe in F.D.R.'s life out of which he forged a victory; it has thus all the contours of the classically beleaguered hero. In addition, Sunrise at Campobello offers the classic motif of external pressures, with F.D.R.'s imperious mother wanting her crippled son, by returning to Hyde Park, to put himself on the shelf, and with Louis McHenry Howe insisting that, as a man born for politics, he must still throw his own hat in the ring.

The play--an immediate box-office hit --has a self-contained narrative, a clear beginning and end. It is the explicit record of a man's physical self-conquest, literally step by step, which is in turn the measure of his inner toughening, adjustment and growth. Of F.D.R.'s relation to politics and public affairs, there is no more than the sounds of tuning up; in his relations with his family, he seems a little too conventionally gay, rationally irritable and distantly intimate. Sunrise at Campobello is most successfully concerned with F.D.R.'s relations to himself. It thus makes possible Ralph Bellamy's extraordinarily effective portrayal, one which achieves not bits of personality but the sense of a person, not a pronouncing of words but a manner of speech. In Bellamy's coping with stretchers, wheelchairs, crutches and braces, in his making himself learn to crawl, in his making something heroic of what is humiliating, there is no trace of tear-jerking vaudevillism or performing virtuosity; there is always a sense of characterization and of character. It is a notable performance, culminating in the advance on crutches to the Convention rostrum--the re-entry into public life--with which Sunrise at Campobello ends.

Though wisely confined to a single significant phase of Roosevelt's career, the play is not a great deal more than a well-composed opportunity for Actor Bellamy. That it fails to be more stems partly from the nature of the undertaking. Playwright Schary is constantly concerned with domestic rather than public matters, not least with home and mother--things that dictate a pretty gingerly and sugar-tongued approach. Some of the play's characters are never really used; some never come alive because of the ticklishness of treating people still actually alive. As a family play, Sunrise, from considerations of taste, lacks flavor. But the play's limitations stem partly, too, from the writing. When Louis Howe and Al Smith are around, there are lively and worldly moments, and brief flares of comedy. But in self-conscious family scenes, the dialogue tends to be wooden; and at other times, with F.D.R. himself, it tends to seem graven on stone.

Dore Schary, 53, oldtime writer, big-wheel cinemagnate and devout Democrat, has long mingled his art with politics. In 1956, after a slump at the box office and a series of money-losing movies (The Swan, Somebody Up There Likes Me), he was fired as production chief of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, suspected that the firing was due in part to his support of Adlai Stevenson. Schary had stumped for Stevenson in the 1952 and 1956 campaigns, also produced the doctrinaire film, Pursuit of Happiness, for the Democratic National Committee.

Soothed and supported by an M-G-M settlement that will pay him $100,000 a year over a ten-year period, Dore Schary set his sights on Broadway, where in the late '203 and '303 he had been a bit actor and an unsuccessful playwright (only one production reached Broadway). "I had long felt there was a play in F.D.R.'s illness," he says. After long talks with the family and meticulous research, Playwright Schary first whipped off the last scene, in which Roosevelt doggedly humps himself to the rostrum on crutches to make the nomination speech, then tuned the rest of the play to that climax.

All of the New York newspaper critics praised the play, and long lines of hopeful ticket buyers formed at the box office. But within the Roosevelt family, Schary's play drew mixed notices. Eleanor Roosevelt called it "an excellent play," but added: "I have no feeling of reality about it. It had no more to do with me than the man in the moon." Said Franklin Jr.: "It is a very accurate and true play."

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