New Play in Manhattan

Strip for Action (by Howard Lindsay & Russel Crouse; produced by Oscar Serlin, Lindsay & Crouse) is a ramshackle play and an uproarious evening. Playwrights Lindsay & Crouse plunged into work with a good idea: turning loose a burlesque troupe in an army camp. To this half-tropical, half-topical brew they add colorfulness, craziness, sex and laughs--they know how.

If getting--and keeping--burlesque in barracks required a musicomedy plot too complicated to explain and too silly to bother about, Lindsay & Crouse never stopped to worry. They tossed in gags--their own, burlesque's, the Army's--by the carload. They waded waist-high in corn. They piled Pelion on Ossa, and Minsky on the War Department. They plundered burlesque for all it was worth--strip teases and straight men, the "elephants" and the "grind"--and then brazenly parodied it.

The general result is hilarious. The show is built like a house of cards but somehow stays up. Its top scenes are its burlesque-show rehearsals: rusty-voiced Joey Faye and Keenan Wynn (son of Ed) ribbing an old gag routine; Billy Koud as a gaunt, lugubrious director illustrating for the chorines how he wants them to dance; legsome Jean Carter doing an all-out strip tease with an openmouthed rookie drummer way off-beat for her "bumps."

Typical gag: A stripteaser, trying to wheedle the Army into letting her do her act, asks whether the boys aren't fighting for American womanhood. Assured that they are, she queries: "Well, then, why can't we show them what they're fighting for?"

This week versatile, 53-year-old Howard Lindsay and puckish, 49-year-old Russel McKinley ("Buck") Crouse had three gold mines on Broadway: Strip for Action (which they wrote), Life With Father (which they adapted), Arsenic and Old Lace (which they produced). They had behind them three musicomedy successes (Anything Goes, Red, Hot and Blue, Hooray for What!). With no failures in six tries, they represent as big a money team as Broadway can boast.

Lindsay has been in the theater since he played Polly of the Circus as a youngster. His upsy-downsy youth included being head man in a tent show, acting in Shakespeare and burlesque. In the early '20s he turned director (Dulcy, To the Ladies); in the early '30s he clicked as an author with She Loves Me Not. In between he married petite, blonde Actress Dorothy Stickney (Mother in Life With Father).

Ohio-born Buck Crouse started off as a cub reporter in Cincinnati, long ago wound up his newspaper career as a columnist on the New York Evening Post. Besides writing books (Mr. Currier and Mr. Ives, Murder Won't Out), he was for five years press agent for the Theater Guild. Chided by his employers for not getting enough publicity for Maxwell Anderson's Valley Forge, he defended himself by reporting that he'd managed to get George Washington's picture on 2-c- stamps.

Teamwork. The pair do all their work together, Grouse at the typewriter, Lindsay pacing the floor. They come out with anything that pops into their heads. "The other guy," says Crouse, "may say it's terrible, but there can be no self-consciousness between collaborators."

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