The Theater: New Plays in Manhattan, Dec. 15, 1952

I’ve Got Sixpence (by John van Druten) is well intended and very ill contrived. The author of The Voice of the Turtle is frankly preaching man’s need for some kind of faith. But in the very act of bringing the light, the dramatist in van Druten himself has lost his way. I’ve Got Sixpence is never persuasive and only fitfully lively.

As in The Voice of the Turtle, the play introduces two kinds of modern girl. One (Vicki Cummings), worldly and anxious for security and comfort, snares a conventionally religious Roman Catholic; their life is shallow but unshaken. The other girl (Viveca Lindfors), serious and independent-minded, rushes into an intense love affair with a bitter, harshly unsentimental young writer who, when she becomes pregnant, refuses to marry her. She, on the brink of suicide, responds to some inner voice; he, finally on the brink of despair, returns to her.

Against such somber lovers, the play sets a rich old blind lady who finds happiness in the teachings of a jolly, messy apostle of The All-Effulgent. Very possibly these two, like Eliot’s silly “assistants” in The Cocktail Party, symbolize a serenity unknown to prideful intellectuals; but they are easier figures to envy than emulate. In any case, the young couple themselves seem less to acquire faith than have it thrust upon them, while the final curtain has less of a spiritual air than the customary romantic one.

Inadequate though it is, the straight preaching in I’ve Got Sixpence merits greater respect than the more entertaining episodes where Playwright van Druten strives to be both high-minded and high-spirited. Where Eliot’s cocktail-party frivolities have real emblematic force, much that is entertaining in I’ve Got Sixpence goes out too directly for laughs. In an extremely serious scene where the writer describes how his publishers have turned down his manuscript, he intrudes such a pure theatrical gag as: “They said it was very well typed”; and for no reason except that it is always surefire with the gallery, there is an incidental crack about Gertrude Stein.

See the Jaguar (by N. Richard Nash) seethed with action, pulsed with meaning, and added up to nothing. Closing at week’s end, it told a melodramatic movie yarn that—loaded down with symbolism —made a lumbering stagecoach. The yarn, laid in mountain country, concerned a crusading young schoolmaster’s struggle against the local villain who tyrannized over people, gobbled up property, caged up animals. Crux of the struggle was a hunt for an unworldly youth fleeing with a $900 inheritance. As a western, Jaguar lacked life because even its gunplay suggested a morality play. As serious drama, it was so portentous that every little movement had three meanings of its own.