New Play in Manhattan

Tide Rising (by George Brewer Jr.; Aldrich & Myers, producers) is a praiseworthy attempt to dramatize the political middle-of-the-road and to distinguish, in the blind storm of passionate prejudices which howl from the Right and Left, the path of truth and justice. In so doing, Playwright Brewer, who wrote Dark Victory for Tallulah Bankhead two seasons ago, occasionally loses his dramatic footing, but never his sense of criticism or fair play.

The economic fulcrum on which Tide Rising is balanced is Jim Cogswell (Grant Mitchell), a smalltown New England druggist. Jim is the kind of man who pays his debts, faces his business troubles courageously, acknowledges his responsibility to the community by serving on the :own council. A natural point of pressure from both the haves and the havenots, Jim runs into his first dilemma when the town's poor folk and laborers want him to authorize construction of a needless high school, while the town's rich folk warn him that he had better not do anything o raise taxes. The boycott on his store which follows Jim's honest decision on the high school affair is nothing to the anguish of his next difficulty.

Jim's wandering boy comes home with a wife, Ruth (Tamara), a beautiful Jewish radical and labor agitator. It is not long before she ousts the old-line labor bosses in the local mill, organizes a strike. The mill owner (Clyde Fillmore) is tough, too. He imports a gang of scabs and arms 20 deputized thugs with machine guns to protect them. Ruth's crowd also has machine guns and the streets are just about ready to run with his fellow citizens blood when Druggist Cogswell gets himself appointed sheriff and tries to substitute for the Fascist way or the Communist way the American way out of the local dilemma. This consists in arresting the ravening leaders of both factions, exporting the scabs, disarming the factory guards, dispersing the picket line and forcing a reasonable agreement on both sides by an aroused and forceful civic leadership.

If the solution of Tide Rising's problem is melodramatic rather than sociologically practical, no fault can be found with Jim's bewildered but honest theme: "I don't know the answers to all these questions. Maybe nobody knows. But I do know they can't be settled by strikes and riots and civil war."

Veteran playgoers were pleased to see amiable, appealing Grant Mitchell (Kempy, It Pays to Advertise), back from Hollywood after seven years, making the very most of the main role.

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