New Plays on Broadway

Advise and Consent (adapted from Allen Drury's novel by Loring Mandel) makes good theater, not for dramatizing anything in political life that seems explosively immediate or real, but by often making vivid use of politics as people, of politics as warfare, of politics as dirt or pay dirt. In its stage adaptation, Allen Drury's bestselling tale of the senatorial fight over a President's nominee for Secretary of State abounds in sharp dilemmas over shadowy issues and in moral positions lacking defined points of view. In terms of political substance, Advise and Consent is vague when not vaporous; in terms of that great feedbox of lively theater, political tactics, it is frequently brisk and even tense.

Being equipped with an all but complete set of political chessmen, Advise and Consent pushes rooks and pawns about with the greatest gusto, keeps crying Check! with particular relish, and in the course of the evening makes almost every known move on the board. Now the opportunist wheedles, now the demagogue roars; now a responsible leader advises, now a deft misleader distorts. The nose puncher swaggers forward, the back stabber lies in wait; the party hack mumbles Yes, sir; the man above party shouts Never! In the play's high-stake memory test, wherein the nominee's years-ago Communist flirtation is set against his chief assailant's years-ago sexual misstep, the one man would kill anyone to win, the other man kills himself. The play's more personal scenes--they are fortunately few--are by all odds its weakest. And straight on from the telltale letter left loose in an open drawer, Advise and Consent far oftener obeys the laws of melodrama than it sheds light on the political depths. Possibly, if political issues and aims are not to be truly probed--something not easily done behind footlights--it is just as well they stay general and simple. But in Advise they not only lack thematic point, they even throw a certain haze over the plot.

What really keeps things going on Rouben Ter-Arutunian's spare, strikingly lighted stage are the classic public combats between honest legislators and honest, honest lagos; the immemorial private confabs between men with one card up their sleeve and men with two; a burly Ed Begley and a determined Richard Kiley resisting the Devil; Kevin McCarthy's rabble-rousing; and the fanged drawl and deadly swoops of Henry Jones's Southern Senator. Advise and Consent never once cuts below the surface, but it does often get behind the scenes.

Under the Yum-Yum Tree (by Lawrence Roman) is the sort of light sex comedy that a critic can't come down on too heavily. One wrinkle to its romance is that, though boy wants to marry, girl thinks they should first live together platonically. The other wrinkle is Hogan, the landlord across the hall, a bachelor with a knack for getting into people's hair and ladies' bedrooms. Out of this new-style menage a trois come three acts of calculated on-the-brinkmanship and technically innocent shenanigans.

All this is as good or bad popular entertainment as an author can make it. Being as relentlessly suggestive as the author can make it, Yum-Yum Tree would jar even if it were good. But it is anything but good; so it becomes tediously repellent. There are a few funny lines, and in a less outraging milieu Hogan might prove an enliveningly outrageous character. In Yum-Yum Tree sex is not merely merchandise; it is shopsoiled, customer-pawed, well-below-street-level stuff.

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