New Plays in Manhattan

The Disenchanted (by Budd Schulberg and Harvey Breit) treats of Manley Halliday, who. if not wholly Scott Fitzgerald, is very much his blood brother. It treats of him, in a running narrative, in defeat; it shows him, by way of flashbacks, in decline. The razzle-dazzle days of the '20s, the champagne-bath marriage to an irresistible playmate and a hopelessly irresponsible wife, the dropping of bank notes like confetti, have left a writer as drained as his bank account. To get money enough to go on with a book, he agrees to work on a Hollywood film about college life.

He sets to work--it is 1939--with a younger Depression-age writer who has admired Halliday's books but quarreled with his values. But beyond having no stomach for short-order hackwork, Halliday has no resources. Daystpass in California and New York as he fishes for ideas in water that has gone over the dam, as he tosses crumpled typewriter paper after crumpled memories, as he struggles against a deadline that is indeed an obituary.

With Jason Robards Jr. impressive as a collapsing standard bearer for his era and vocation, and with George Grizzard excellent as the younger writer, the main narrative has many moments, such as Halliday's proud roll call of Jazz Age names, that are vibrantly nostalgic, as it has others, such as Halliday's white-knuckled attempt to summarize a scenario that has never been written, that are tensely moving. Elsewhere, at times, the main story is wordy and under-dramatized. Despite Rosemary Harris' period appeal as the wife, the flashbacks seem inadequate, do more to catch a half-legendary Jazz Age mood than to explain a disintegrating writer. What destroyed any such writer must go beyond mere high-stepping idiocies to the full lure of wealth and high life that he succumbed to, and it must go beneath the killing froth of a marriage to its dark, neurotic lees. It must convey someone the more disenchanted for having first been so strangely romantic, and it might well suggest a gifted writer's self-delusion that memory would afterward recoup with words what had been squandered on wine and women. The twists and turns along Halliday's road down remain largely uncharted. But The Disenchanted does not adulterate or gloss over. It treats writers as writers, Hollywood as Hollywood, truth as truth. It has a sense of the real thing and of what it means; it knows that, for the bedeviled writer, good intentions can be paved with hell. Whatever its flaws as playwriting, it deals feelingly with authorship.

The Night Circus (by Michael V. Gazzo) finds the author of A Hatful of Rain once again garishly grim. His scene, shifting between a crummy, dimly lit bar and a sleazy apartment, fits the play's characters with their inner loneliness, outer violence, anarchic dreams. Into the bar, on her wedding eve, comes a beautiful girl (Janice Rule) in prenuptial revolt against a stodgy suburban future; next day she returns, in her wedding dress, to go off with a hard-boiled sailor (well played by Ben Gazzara). The rest of the play concerns the unborn child of the fiance she walked out on, the father she drives to death, and her tempestuous affair with the sailor, who at length walks out on her.

Picturing a rootless, tangled world. Playwright Gazzo has an ear for the harsh and guttural, an eye for the tarnished and messy, and too much of a mind for both. So crammed is his scene with lives near precipices and gutters as to cry out for someone merely in a rut. His people, as they talk and philosophize, become embarrassingly florid. His heroine is both a Jazz Age and a Beat Generation type: the self-pitying, self-dramatizing, greedily restless girl who destroys others on the way to destroying herself. But the play's realistic-romantic approach to her is blurred and unsure.

With Playwright Gazzo's desire to portray a new Lost Generation goes a need to empurple it; with his feeling for vivid lingo goes a taste for bad pothouse lyricism. Nor is he aware that violence not only differs from intensity but defeats it, or that such blatant naturalism as his must lead to unreality.

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