New Plays on Broadway

The Tumbler (by Benn W. Levy) was the sixth Broadway production to open in February and close within a week. A harrowingly pretentious verse drama, The Tumbler was the deadliest of the six, while also providing the most newsworthy casualties: Director Laurence Olivier, Actors Charlton Heston, Rosemary Harris and Martha Scott, and a playwright who once wrote Springtime for Henry.

Toys in the Attic (by Lillian Hellman) slaps a slumped, lethargic theatrical season into awareness. The reason is not just that Toys has a sense of tautness, insight and power; it also has a pervasive sense of playwriting. It constitutes a dramatic journey, with a destination, rather than a mere series of vivid theatrical way stations. And it so clearly reaches its destination that its finest moments are its concluding ones. This alone is outstanding in a Broadway theater world that, even when it knows where it is going, too often about-faces when it gets there.

Laid in New Orleans, Toys in the Attic pivots on 34-year-old Julian Berniers, a weak, likable ne'er-do-well who has been protectively kept going by two adoring old-maid sisters who toil and stint for him. Recently he has married an odd, unbalanced rich girl who is possessively happy with him only when they are hard up. Suddenly and mysteriously, Julian manages to get hold of a lot of money. He comes home, cocky and excited, to fling money about, shower everyone with presents, give his sisters passages to Europe and a paid-off mortgage.

But no one is jubilant; in fact, everyone is distressed. Julian's wife and sisters somehow know that they have lost him now that he has found his feet; his ungrown-up dependence on them was their happiness, his money spells their insecurity. They also know, learn, or are told many other things--for example, one of Julian's sisters has always had an incestuous love for him. It is she, acting through the simple-minded wife, who viciously contrives to get Julian back with them on the old terms. But they are not the old terms. Blindman's Buff has become I Spy; nursemaids have proved false, toys been broken, children hurt.

The play has its weak points: by becoming melodramatic, the action seems a little too manipulated, and it is intricate and talky in getting under way. But even then it is an action in the service of a theme. Playwright Hellman's old mordant power is in evidence again and again, but Toys combines it with a broadened sense of humanity. Always sharp at characterization, the author of The Little Foxes has become more probing and wide-ranging about character. She has passed from human greed to something at times no prettier but much more universalizing: human need, the ego's fierce need to be needed and be loved, and hence its ugly need, when foiled, to hurt or betray or destroy. In Toys it is not vixen teeth that bite, but human lips denied a kiss.

Arthur Penn has staged the play admirably. Jason Robards Jr. as Julian, Anne Revere as his older sister and Rochelle Oliver as his wife give solid performances. Maureen Stapleton's conniving sister is full of fascinating detail; as Julian's mother-in-law, a cool, unsentimental woman with a Negro lover, Irene Worth plays with wonderful style.

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