The Theater: New Play in Manhattan, Oct. 16, 1950

The Gioconda Smile (by Aldous Huxley; produced by Shepard Traube) was a Huxley short story and film before becoming a play. Its trick ironic plot still had a certain crude fascination on Broadway last week; and Huxley, turned playwright, was still plainly a man of parts. But The Gioconda Smile offered mournful proof of what the stage can do to harm a piece of writing and of how time can accentuate a writer’s faults.

The story tells of a middle-aged man whose unwanted invalid wife suddenly dies. Almost immediately the man marries the Other Woman (Marian Russell)—a young girl he is smitten with and has got with child. But there is a second Other Woman—an older one, madly in love with the man, who has long imagined that he is in love with her. At this point it turns out, as was obvious all along, that the invalid was poisoned; and at this point the murderer’s identity is almost as obvious.

The play hardly purports to be a mystery; but in return it insists on being just about everything else, psychological and emotional, cultural and philosophic. There is a large mass of death cells and thunderstorms, bloody hands and lethal highballs; of human beings maddened by guilt, crazed with fear, foul-mouthed from frustration. There is a potpourri of metaphysics from the Gospels to Kierkegaard; of poetry from Marvell to Shelley; of painting from Modigliani to Cézanne.

The result, though sometimes good talk and sometimes good purple theater, is a kind of botch. The violence is not too surprising; as a satirist, Huxley has always liked to draw blood and leave welts. But beyond that, like many essentially critical talents seeking to be creative, he goes to extremes, and overcreates; when he isn’t being literary, he is being lurid. And here, without the armor of style, he lunges out with every rusty saber of theatricalism. The Gioconda smile is rather a maniacal laugh. And the production—with Basil Rathbone hamming as the husband and Valerie Taylor brilliantly overacting as the woman scorned—adds thumping the pedal to banging the keys.