The Theater: New Play in Manhattan, Jan. 21, 1957

New Play in Manhattan A Clearing in the Woods (by Arthur Laurents) found a fairly new way to treat a neurotic woman. The treatment—which was theatrical, not medical, and consisted of physically landscaping her troubled mind and fleshing her ugly memories—was unsuccessful, as it was basically unwise. But in a flabby season, at least Playwright Laurents (The Time of the Cuckoo) attempted something provocative and at times achieved something striking; and Kim Stanley (Bus Stop) was frequently brilliant in a taxing role.

The play had its overwrought romantic egoist of a heroine delving among memories of her father, of the men in her life, and of herself at earlier stages (played by three other actresses who vaguely resembled her).

Against Oliver Smith’s fine woodland set—a sort of field-and-stream of consciousness—the self-probing yielded moments both of sharp fantasy and of sharp perception. But an ultra-subjective method, which by now is a commonplace of fiction, has no proper place in drama. It is not just that drama works from the outside in, rather than vice versa, but that such mental voyaging, in the theater, is seldom sly, swift and aberrant enough to seem real, nor cumulative enough to be dramatic.

Choked with method and starved for substance, the play offered only a predicament, not a situation, while the situations that led to the predicament rarely individualized the heroine or galvanized the story. Hers were all-too-familiar aggressions and hurts and guilts; and she too was only a predicament, never really a person.