The Theater: New Plays in Manhattan, Nov. 2, 1953

The Frogs of Spring (by Nathaniel Benchley) concerns two Manhattan families who live in adjoining houses—or, for stage purposes, adjoining backyards. Both the husbands (Anthony Ross and Hiram Sherman) are boyishly irresponsible; and having, in sudden Blutbrüderschaft, removed the fence between their yards, they go in for endeavors involving more bourbon than brainwork—helium tanks, portable swimming pools, stilt houses for their reluctant young. This way of living leads in time to a loss of jobs and temporary decline in brotherliness.

Robert Benchley’s playwright son Nathaniel has a nice share of the family wit, both wacky and urbane. The Frogs of Spring is full of bubbly moments and gaily nonsensical projects. But there is nothing—not even the proverbial thread —to hold its good things together. The going gets increasingly harder as the play more and more stands still; its pranks are never mobilized into a plot, its fun displays no foresight. The play has its rewarding oases, but also its drowsy camel rides over desert sands.

The Ladies of the Corridor (by Dorothy Parker & Arnaud d’Usseau) are the widows who lead empty, unanchored, lonely lives in a quietly handsome Manhattan apartment hotel. At their most obvious, they advance from one daily major crisis to another—from switching to a new kind of nail polish to deciding which novel to doze through. And when not personally agitated, they haunt the lobby to sniff the crises in the lives of their more adventurous sisters.

Of the more adventurous ones, there is middle-aged Lulu Ames (Edna Best), who moves east from Akron to see more of her family. She gets caught up in an affair with a younger man (Walter Matthau) and then, from loving and handling him too possessively, loses him. There is elderly Mrs. Nichols (Frances Starr), who rules her greying son from a wheelchair and, when he starts to rebel, blackmails him back into submission. There is Mildred Tynan (Betty Field), whom an ill-made, broken-up marriage has driven to drink.

These chronicles, whether gossipy or grim, are punctuated with the celebrated Parker wit; they reveal, with a sudden bite, insight into women. A populous play, The Ladies of the Corridor gains from Harold Clurman’s clean, vigorous direction. And its best and most stage-center story, that of Lulu Ames, has also its finest and most life-charged acting—a genuinely brilliant performance by Edna Best. But despite its virtues, the play comes, somehow, to make too much of a bad thing. As its half-dozen makeshift, rootless lives pile up in number, they seem to decline in significance.

Perhaps the trouble lies in the very setup. The women, seen a little symbolically from the outset, have a kind of prefabricated, sometimes even preshrunken, air. Rather than revealing the fluid, inconsistent, tragicomic nature of life, they are observed through steadily satiric or sentimental eyes. Also, though the usual hotel offers a vivid cross section and possesses variety, a hotel awash with lonely women is a specialty shop and provides excess. The play offers valid social criticism. But it might better have spotlighted a familiar type through one full-fashioned individual; created, say, a Lulu Ames who might become much the same kind of symbol as a Lulu Bett, a Jay Gatsby, an Alice Adams or a George F. Babbitt.