Theater: New Plays In Manhattan, Jan. 29, 1951

Angel in the Pawnshop (by A. B. Shiffrin; produced by Eddie Dowling & Anthony B. Farrell) is set in a pawnshop —with all the sad variety of its wares, and all the tangled human history behind them, to draw upon. But Playwright Shiffrin has written a sentimental fantasy in which everything that doesn’t seem banal seems borrowed, and in which he displays a kind of genius for crushing the life of words.

Into his soft-lighted pawnshop with its softhearted proprietor (Eddie Dowling) flutters, one day, a young girl (Joan McCracken). In full flight from a gangster husband, she has taken refuge inside a 16th Century dream world. Sometimes she dances, sometimes declaims, sometimes just dresses up like Queen Elizabeth. The gangster comes along to precipitate melodrama; other people, who have pawned their valuables, introduce humor, pathos, romance.

What poetry and picturesqueness Angel possesses stem from John E. Blankenchip’s set and lighting, and Will Irwin’s incidental music. The play itself is as devoid of charm as it is of sense, and the players do not help much. Joan McCracken is almost overbearingly girlish. Eddie Dowling — dying at the end with a bright smile and a brighter spotlight on his face — displays his habitual unconquerable benevolence, his seeming desire to bring to humanity all the year round what A Christmas Carol brings it at Christmas.

Four Twelves Are 48 (by Joseph Kesselring; produced by Richard Aldrich & Richard Myers in association with Julius Fleischmann) was the first play of Kesselring’s to reach Broadway since Arsenic and Old Lace in 1941. It was also very nearly the worst play to reach Broadway since that time. It dealt with a family whose females, one after another, became unmarried mothers at twelve. Almost certainly anyone with the ability to handle such a subject would lack the desire. Playwright Kesselring handled it so crudely that, before the show closed after two performances, he had audiences wincing and yawning at the same time.