The Theater: New Plays in Manhattan, Jan. 7, 1946

Dunnigan’s Daughter (by S. N. Behrman; produced by the Theatre Guild) is principally concerned with Dunnigan’s daughter’s husband. It is a study of an industrialist obsessed with power, made by a dramatist obsessed with words. The result is not a happy one. Far from creating a figure of real size and will, Dunnigan’s Daughter can never quite wriggle out of language into life. Some of the language is artful, witty and shiny-smooth; but eventually it makes every situation seem rhetorical and every character seem unreal.

A silky, cynical, egotistical U.S. tycoon living in Mexico, Clay Rainier (Dennis King) not only lusts after power in the business world; he needs to subjugate his young third wife (June Havoc) and his grown-up daughter. In both spheres his methods are entirely heartless. But in neither sphere does he ultimately succeed. He is undermined by a smooth Mexican mural painter (Luther Adler) and a cool young State Department man who arrives to investigate, and goes away to expose Rainier’s business operations. Finally, Rainier’s waked-up, worm-turning wife runs away, leaving behind a rebellious daughter.

In Dunnigan’s Daughter, Playwright Behrman (The Second Man, Rain from Heaven) presumably aimed at some sharp social criticism of a business buccaneer, as well as some lively theater about a complex brute. But his buccaneer is little more than a fancy villain in a melodrama; and there isn’t enough melodrama.

Home of the Brave (by Arthur Laurents; produced by Lee Sabinson in association with William R. Katzell) is a serious and provocative play, but not quite a good one. Laid in the Pacific, it introduces a Jewish G.I. who has become paralyzed through intense nervous shock. It then proceeds to dig for the cause by having the G.I. reenact, for an Army psychiatrist, his recent experiences. Deeply sensitive about being a Jew, Peter Cohen had heard his buddy, in a moment of danger, stifle a taunt at his race. When, the next moment, his friend was shot, Peter felt glad—and then more & more guilty. When the friend died, Peter’s legs suddenly went dead on him.

Peter is cured. He loses his feeling of guilt when he is made to realize that his moment of gladness was perfectly normal—what every soldier feels when somebody else, and not himself, is hit. He also loses, much less convincingly, his prickliness about being a Jew when a one-armed soldier reminds him that there are other and far more painful ways of being “different.”

Aside from its too-glib windup, Home of the Brave offers a plausible case history, and handles it with intelligence. But, despite several pretty tense scenes of warfare, the play remains more case history than solid drama. Though it burdens its hero with a double problem, it hasn’t enough material for a single play.