The Theater: New Play in Manhattan, Apr. 5, 1948

The Respectful Prostitute (translated from the French of Jean-Paul Sartre by Eva Wolas; produced by New Stages, Inc.) reached Broadway from Paris via Greenwich Village. Produced in February by a Village group only founded in October, The Respectful Prostitute throve so well in a bandbox that it is now tackling the big time. There it may thrive, too, thanks about equally to skill and sensationalism.

A short two-acter, Prostitute is Existentialist Sartre’s blast at racism and reaction in the U.S. South (which he visited briefly in 1946). The play tells how Lizzie McKaye, a Northern prostitute new to a Southern town, is unsuccessfully high-pressured but effectively soft-soaped into accepting the town’s mores. She signs a paper that frames a Negro for rape and lets a white murderer go free. Afterwards Lizzie (well played by Meg Mundy*) feels tricked and disturbed, hides the Negro during a manhunt. But Liz eventually becomes resigned and “respectful”—she agrees to be the mistress of a particularly bigoted big shot.

As an indictment, Prostitute pretty much fails—much less for being factually improbable than for being dramatically overdone. Sartre’s soft-soaping Senator, for instance, is pure burlesque, and too amusing to be alarming; the whole story is so charged with sex and suspense that it titillates rather than terrifies. But if Prostitute is no tocsin of social protest, it rings the bell as melodrama.

* Meg’s angular grace and deadpan beauty have made her for seven years one of Harry Conover’s top ($25-an-hour) models. But after a chorus of critical raves for her Liz, she said: “I just want parts and more parts.”