New Play in Manhattan

In Time to Come (by Howard Koch & John Huston; produced by Otto Preminger) leafs back to an instructive page of U.S. history. It tells the sorry tale of Woodrow Wilson's vision of a just peace and powerful League of Nations after World War I, of the conniving that crippled that vision at Versailles, and the opposition that destroyed it at home.

No great shakes as a play--at times rhetorical, at moments wooden, wobbly at the start, dawdling at the end--In Time to Come is yet a vivid stage document. At least twice-when the high-minded Wilson comes up against the hardheaded Lloyd George and the cynical Clemenceau, and when, back in Washington, he faces the rocklike hostility of Senator Lodge--the play crackles with verbal drama. In its treatment of issues and men it does not falsify, seldom takes sides. If it turns Wilson (Richard Gaines) into something of a hero for what he tried to do, it never for a second palliates what he was or why he failed. Its Wilson is an obstinate, opinionated, frozen-faced idealist who trampled on his friends, spat on his enemies, and so recoiled from "politicians" that he never had a glimmer of how to cope with them.

The play's title is a sharp plea that what happened after the last war shall not happen after this one. There could be worse things at World War II's peace conference than a command performance of In Time to Come.

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