New Play on Broadway

One More River (by Beverly Cross) gets vigorously if rather reminiscently under way: a crummy rust-bucket of a freighter, a dead captain, a viciously tyrannizing mate, a respected bosun, a resentful crew. When it appears that the mate has thrown boiling water into the deck boy's face and blinded him, the crew is so boiling itself that, but for the bosun's insistence on a proper trial, it would string the mate up. The trial involves sensational charges and the mate's defense gets into the deeper waters of character. At the same time the play itself gets into deeper waters, and there it eventually drowns. In a clutch of sudden deaths, crucial signal lights, lies whitening into truths, loyalties rusting into funk, and rats deserting a sinking bosun, disbelief noses out tension and playwriting mishaps outnumber maritime accidents.

Playwright Cross's desperate measures for keeping melodrama afloat at all costs and his not knowing that too many wrinkles spoil the plot sink what starts off as a good realistic thriller and what, as staged by Windsor Lewis and acted by Lloyd Nolan, Alfred Ryder and others, remains a good naturalistic production. Although to scratch any of the play's characters is to find a stereotype of stage and sea, their talk is effectively racy and their mutineering instincts show promise. The trouble, in the end, is that they mutiny on the author. The play closed at week's end.

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