The Theater: Big Week in Manhattan

After three months largely concerned with gimcracks and revivals, Broadway itself revived last week. On successive nights, three established U.S. playwrights—Maxwell Anderson with Joan of Lorraine, George Kelly with The Fatal Weakness, Lillian Hellman with Another Part of the Forest—brought showers or real rain to parched ground:

Joan of Lorraine (produced by the Playwrights’ Company) was really Ingrid Bergman’s evening—her first on Broadway since 1940—for Maxwell Anderson has written not so much a play as something playable. But it is enough to call forth all that is charming, serene and radiantly childlike in Miss Bergman, who, like the Joan of Arc she portrays, is a kind of presence.*

Bernard Shaw having walked off with Saint Joan for the theater of his time, and perhaps of all time, Playwright Anderson prudently goes at her sidelong, writing a play within a play. He portrays actors rehearsing, on a bare stage, a play about Joan; and he laces their drama with hers by having the director (nicely played by Sam Wanamaker) and the leading lady squabble over the script’s delineation of the Maid.

The starry-eyed actress refuses to accept a Joan willing to compromise, to achieve her mission by working with evil men. The more hard-headed director, a typically Anderson dialectician, defends such a conception, and redefines the actress’ idea of “faith.” All set to throw up her role, the actress discovers, while rehearsing the final scenes, a Joan intransigent enough to die for her beliefs—and settles for that, with the director, as the true test.

For all its philosophical overtones about faith—which blot out the earlier and sharper issue of compromise—Joan of Lorraine is too trickily written, too full of backstage triviality, too discontinuous in its drama to be more than a serious stunt. Yet Joan’s story, even when told piecemeal and with no particular eloquence, can still vibrate when enacted by someone suggesting Joan’s stature—as Actress Bergman proves.

The Fatal Weakness (produced by the Theatre Guild) finds the George Kelly who has so often gone after women with a whip (Craig’s Wife, Behold the Bridegroom) merely thwacking them with a hairbrush—and almost patting the heroine on the head. The Fatal Weakness is sharp-eyed but light-reined comedy that would be straight matinee stuff were not much of it matinee stuff in reverse. Unsentimental Playwright Kelly has a way of suddenly going against traffic—of, for example, letting a curtain flutter down just where a standard-brander would start licking his chops. Again, after ringing all the changes on the predicament of a sympathetic wife who finds that her husband has been unfaithful, Kelly (and the wife) let the husband marry the other woman.

The wife, Ollie Espenshade, is pictured as a great romantic about love in general (she never misses a wedding) but as not much affected by love herself. Beyond that she is almost as fluid as, in Ina Claire’s brilliantly deft, witty portrayal, she is fetching. In fact, the great (but far from fatal) weakness of the play is its untidiness, its insouciance, its moving less in a straight line than like a knight at chess. But if its texture is slight, its touch is sure. And in single scenes it manages to be as funny as it is shrewd. The scenes in which the befuddled yet businesslike Ollie tracks down—with the help of a notably efficient friend—the details of her husband’s infidelity, tingle all over with good mean fun.

Another Part of the Forest (produced by Kermit Bloomgarden) carries the Hubbards of The Little Foxes back 20 years to 1880, when their parents were in their prime. With their father as straight-out a scoundrel as themselves—though a much more complex person—the new play has as harsh and hateful an atmosphere as the old one. But it has also as smashing a drive, as sharp a bite.

*Backstage, just before the curtain went up on opening night, Miss Bergman followed a childlike Swedish custom—she was kicked by another member of the cast for good luck.