The Theater: New Plays in Manhattan, Oct. 27, 1952

The Millionairess (by George Bernard Shaw) is probably one of the best plays ever written by a man near 80, but it is one of the least satisfactory of Shaw’s. It might by now have been thankful for shelf space without aspiring to stage production, had not Katharine Hepburn dared the termagant title role in London last summer and achieved a sensation. As the richest and presumably the most roughshod-riding woman in. England—possessing 30 million pounds and probably 40 million horsepower—she makes every entrance an eruption and every exit a bombardment.

Bullying and aggressive, she is Shaw’s symbol of entrenched wealth, and perhaps his embodiment of a thesis that unless wealth keeps on snowballing, it will melt away. Challenged to live on a pittance, she goes to work in a slum and in no time is richer than ever. In one of his most effective passages, Shaw has her defend her resistance to all charitable appeals on the theory that it is the first step that counts, that to part with a farthing may open the door to losing a fortune. Shaw, who loved money itself almost as much as he attacked most ways of making it, himself seems curiously sympathetic with the lady’s point of view.

Though all the play’s ideas are familiar and many of its situations are inept, it has its interludes of fun; had Shaw but written it 60 years earlier, it would undoubtedly have been said to show promise. As it stands, it is simply a vehicle—a monster bulldozer—for Actress Hepburn, who bangs about in it with gusto. She has come far from the days when Dorothy Parker described her as running the gamut from A to B. In The Millionairess she runs it from ff to fff. The effect is often enjoyable and ultimately monotonous.

The Time of the Cuckoo (by Arthur Laurents) concerns Americans in a Venetian pensione, and some of the more controversial points of international love. While a pair of elderly Babbitts dutifully take in the sights, a young American painter, despite his love for his wife, strays with his worldly landlady; and a lonely spinster, Leona Samish (Shirley Booth), becomes involved with an antique-shop owner (Dino DiLuca).All the more romantic about love for never having known the reality, Leona has a saddening experience. Not only does she find that the man is married; he cannot pay for the garnets he has given her, and when she pays for them, the money he got for her on the black market turns out to be counterfeit. He. though remorseful, tells her that she can only view romance through materialistic symbols, and their brief affair comes to a disconsolate end.

Playwright Laurents (Home of the Brave, The Bird Cage) is the latest of many writers to exhibit two colliding traditions of love. He wisely seems to suggest that there is something to be said on both sides, though his heroine’s plight with her merchant of Venice seems a bit extreme, a little like the setup for an Ethel Merman song. But Cuckoo offers some sound enough comments, and some effective scenes. And there is the opportunity for Actress Booth to display her fine gifts for comedy and pathos.

Though far better than Laurents’ shoddy The Bird Cage, The Time of the Cuckoo is still scarcely a success. Laurents shows considerable honesty of approach, but his talent for the obvious grows constantly more expert. Furthermore, he has either no feeling for tone, or no respect for it. What should be a rueful comedy is allowed to lapse into sentimental drama, only for the dramatic scenes to go after laughs at the wrong times. Leona is plausibly portrayed as a wry wisecracker; but her gags are of the pathetic, defensive sort that should enhance her emotional moments, not shatter them.

Bernardine (by Mary Chase) is a young sister to Harvey, with something of his madness, a touch of his magnetism, and, like him, invisible throughout. Playwright Chase is concerned with teen-age boys—their reveries, ritualisms, lingo, dates and dames. Bernardine is the composite girl of their dreams, the not impossible but not very probable she.

The leader whom the other boys idolize and kowtow to is hellishly smooth Arthur Beaumont, who demonstrates the principle that every man is a valet to his hero. But the play’s hero is Buford Weldy (engagingly played by Johnny Stewart). Buford is a violent suitor, not above strong-arming his dates or flinging them into creeks. He has become a sort of outcast, but with desperate audacity and sob-story technique he manages to pick up an older woman in a hotel lobby—who turns out to be both a family friend and a wise counselor. How Buford is returned to the fold he had previously come down like a wolf on, completes a sometimes very funny and generally entertaining evening.

Both ordinary stagecraft and ordinary psychology floor Playwright Chase. Not reality but flight from it is her great talent; only with a wand or a wishbone in her hand can she be really amusing. She knows teen-agers less for usual reasons than because she knows daydreamers, and they are the greatest daydreamers of them all. What Bernardine offers is an adolescent vaudeville show. Though most of her boys carry draft cards, they are really still in the report-card set. They indulge in Penrod’s kind of pranks as well as Willie Baxter’s type of attitude; they are half real, half concocted and synthetic, a sort of Catcher in the Corn.

The Gambler (adapted from the Italian of Ugo Betti by Alfred Drake and Edward Eager) mounts stilts, in a dense fog, to peer at a marriage already dissolved by death. David Petri (forcefully played by Alfred Drake) must face, in postwar Italy, an inquiry concerning the death of his wife Eva. Eva’s sister accuses him of having murdered her. It eventually turns out that, subconsciously wishing her dead, he has made it possible for soldiers to kill her. With Eva reappearing at intervals in various spectral forms, the play revolves less around David’s legal than his moral guilt. As it proceeds, it probes the tragedy of marital and indeed all human misunderstanding, the nature of love & hate, and of good & evil.

Unlike most Broadway plays. The Gambler tries to say something. But though Playwright Betti shows metaphysical courage, he has little dramatic force. What with rhetorical flights on wings that collapse, and philosophical depth bombs that refuse to explode, the play is at most an interesting dud. It has suggestions of Pirandello without his wit, of Kafka without his vivid symbolism, of Dostoevsky without his vision, and of 19th century German romanticism with all its sentimentality. Nothing comes to life, least of all the language.