The Theater: New Plays in Manhattan, Oct. 9, 1950

Season in the Sun (by Wolcott Gibbs; produced by Courtney Burr & Malcolm Pearson) gave Broadway, for the first time in years, a play by one of its own drama critics. It also gave the lie to the notion that a drama critic’s talents are rigidly confined to his criticism. To be sure, The New Yorker’s Critic Wolcott Gibbs is anything but a typical theatrical reviewer: with his parodies, profiles and assorted humorous squibs he has won at least as great a name for comedy as for criticism.

With his first play he will win much more of a name for comedy than for stagecraft. Telling of summer-colony life on Fire Island, Season traverses an old creaking boardwalk of a plot, often stubs its toe in the sand. And whenever its characters try to prove useful rather than ornamental, they just melt away in the sun. Season lacks—no doubt because Fire Island does—the polished urbanity of Gibbs’s prose, and even drops at times to the level of very routine Broadway comedy. But the play has the stalwart merit of often being exceedingly funny; a good many of the characters are splendidly massacred; and though the story is decidedly straggly, the point of it is sound.

The central figure (well played by Richard Whorf) is a man like Gibbs who writes for a magazine like The New Yorker. But, in a convulsion of high seriousness, he has resolved to write for it no more—and to be a part, no more, of Fire Island’s raffish bohemianism, with its drunks and derelicts, its scarlet ladies and lissome young men. He starts writing a massively earnest novel, maddens his easygoing wife (Nancy Kelly) with his moral heroics, and as though it weren’t enough to be on the wagon, tries to hitch it to a star. It takes a walkout by his wife a night with a blonde and a bottle, and a good sound talking-to from his boss, to restore him to humanity—and show that one trouble with comedians who play Hamlet is that they would seem to be playing Polonius.

The best part of the story is its interruptions, its fine gaudy displays of character and character-acting, whether of a harridan of a landlady (Grace Valentine), a collector’s item of a bore (Eddie Mayehoff) or an affectionately spluttering caricature of New Yorker Editor Harold Ross (Anthony Ross). The whole production—skillfully staged by Burgess Meredith—is very helpful; and thanks to Playwright Gibbs’s Season, Broadway’s appears finally on the march.

Affairs of State (by Louis Verneuil; produced by Richard W. Krakeur & Fred F. Finklehoffe) is a frightfully well-connected little comedy with a plot that has been prominent in the theater for generations. Though it is sophisticated as well—for Author Verneuil has spent most of his life in Paris—somehow none of this avails much. The scene, here, is only Washington, and the author’s thinnish wit fights a losing battle against the audience’s memory.

A suave old former Secretary of State has a much younger wife who seeks her freedom—to marry (as he learns without her telling him) a Senator her own age. The Secretary’s bland if not too convincing strategy is to make the Senator lose ground politically by being a bachelor, and then hurry him into a marriage-in-name-only with a seemingly plain and simple schoolteacher. In a trice, of course, the bride grows wildly attractive and wonderfully astute. This state of affairs, even when christened Affairs of State, can have but one outcome.

By hitching the plot of the man who slyly deprives his wife of her lover onto that of the man who falls in love with his mere convenience of a wife, Playwright Verneuil less enriches the enjoyment than prolongs the agony. The whole story, being almost as involved as it is predictable needs two or three buildup scenes for every one that proves at all entertaining. In spots, Verneuil fans Affairs with fairly lively comments about life and breezy cackle about Washington; as the bride, Celeste Holm is deft and bright when not forced to be coy; as the scheming old statesman, Reginald Owen is urbanity itself. But neither play nor production comes to much as a whole.

Southern Exposure (by Owen Crump; produced by Margo Jones, Tad Adoue & Manning Gurian) begins as a barn-door-broad spoof of those who inhabit and those who inspect the mortgaged old mansions of Natchez. Leading chatelaine—and character—is Penelope Mayweather (Betty Greene Little), a spinster who when not fluttering like a bird is secretly drinking like a fish. After a while the play shifts to farcical romance between an engaged Natchez belle and an enraged Yankee writer whose book Natchez has banned. But the satire keeps on recurring with the monotonous regularity of a lone rider on a merry-go-round.

Southern Exposure is one of those little jobs that lay everything on too thick and yet seem pathetically thin. The spoofing is as primitive as the objects of it are genteel; the romance, though it would seem recklessly swift in real life, seems endless on the stage. But the root trouble with the play is its mediocre writing. Satire just as broad and boy-meets-girl stuff just as corny have clicked as popular entertainment by dint of bright and lively lines. Playwright Crump will have to get on with his dialogue if he hopes to make good as a hack.

Black Chiffon (by Lesley Storm; produced by John Wildberg) refers to the nightgown that matronly, well-to-do Alicia Christie (Flora Robson) shoplifted off a counter. She had gone out to shop for a dinner party in honor of her son’s marriage and she came home facing trial for theft. The rest of the play searches out, with a psychiatrist’s help, her motive for so strange an act, and then ponders whether she can use the motive for her defense. She finds that, just as her husband has always jealously resented her being so close to their son, so she has jealously resented her son’s getting married.

It would be unfair to say more and rob Black Chiffon of whatever suspense it has; that, along with the chance it gives people to act, is just about its only virtue. It is one of those triangle stories of the husband, the wife and the offspring treated to a British mixture of the melodramatic, the mawkish and the scandalous. It is Freud for suburban housewives whose buzzing classroom is the Wednesday matinee. Offering theft as an aperitif, it follows up with a seemingly headier and more dangerous brew that is actually rather saccharine and soporific.

Flora Robson acts the harassed Mrs. Christie with quiet authority and a complete absence of tricks, and Anthony Ireland and Raymond Huntley do well as psychiatrist and husband. A play so full of shocks and dilemmas naturally has its moments. What seems odd is that there aren’t more of them.