The Theatre: New Plays in Manhattan, Mar. 26, 1945

Dark of the Moon (by Howard Richardson & William Berney; produced by the Messrs. Shubert) laudably strays off the beaten track, but lucklessly tarries too long in the tall grass.

Half fey, half folksy, the play is based on the Southern mountaineer (not the Old English) ballad of Barbara Allen. For love of high-stepping young Barbara (Carol Stone), a witch boy in the Great Smokies (Richard Hart) has a Conjur Woman make him human. But he can remain so, the old crone tells him, only if Barbara stays faithful to him for a year after their marriage. On the last night of the year, the community,* at last awake to the boy’s origin, compels Barbara to sin. (A rape scene that the censors knocked out of the play in Washington remains out on Broadway.) The boy becomes a witch again,.and Barbara dies.

There are some nice things in Dark of the Moon. With its folk songs and dances, its revival meetings and darting witch girls, it is freaked with color, touched with strangeness. But all this adds brightness rather than body to a yarn that is never very robust, and that takes hours to re-count what the ballad tells in a moment. Nor is there much more real poetry to Dark of the Moon than there is real drama. Its folkways make pleasant enough rustic vaudeville, but they smell of Broadway. Its witches’ world escapes absurdity, but falls far short of enchantment.

Foolish Notion (by Philip Barry; produced by the Theater Guild). A worldling and a wit, Philip Barry is really at home only in a drawing room. But, as a dabbler in philosophic fantasy, he is also a little stifled there: the Pirandello in him is always edging out the Pinero. In Foolish Notion Barry has held to the drawing room, but has carefully thrown open its windows to the mysterious night air. The result is that child of fashion and fantasy. a jeu d’esprit.

Sophie Wing (Tallulah Bankhead) is a famous actress whose husband went abroad and enlisted in 1939, was soon after reported missing, and later declared legally dead. Now in 1944 Sophie is about to marry her leading man (Donald Cook) when a queer phone call announces that her husband is on his way to her house. Before he arrives, Sophie’s fiancé, then her father, then her little daughter, and finally Sophie herself have extensive visions of what the reunion will be like. Keeping to the brittle comedy mood of the play, Barry uses the visions for satire rather than sentiment, for showing how precocious children and posturing stagefolk dramatize situations. The child sees her father slain by the Other Man; Sophie visualizes her husband’s ashes brought to her, by his former mistress, in a silver urn. Then the husband really enters and the story is resolved.

A bright enough idea, Barry’s fantasy winds up seeming more like just a foolish notion. For all the Elizabeth Ardenish chic with which he has surrounded his Enoch Ardenish story, Barry cannot pump any real life or lightness into it. The visions make neither good sense nor good nonsense; the ending of the play is lame; the dialogue is sometimes bright but often flashy, and riddled with literary puns (“I have been faithful to thee, Cynara. after my Old Fashioneds”). For its best moments Foolish Notion can thank deep-throated Actress Bankhead—a tiger in her wrath and also (with a funny line) a tiger in her timing.

* A member of whose younger set is portrayed, under the stage name of Tony Eden, by Walter Winchell’s 1 8-year-old daughter Walda.