New Plays in Manhattan

The Pirate (by S. N. Behrman; produced by The Playwrights' Company & The Theater Guild) is the season's gayest bore. Everything conceivable has been done to make it seem that Playwright Behrman has really written a play. The sets are charming. The incidental music is lively. The costumes are gorgeous. Above all, Alfred Lunt & Lynn Fontanne--he at his most swashbuckling, she at her most mischievous--romp and cavort for all they are worth.

An opera bouffe laid in the West Indies of a century ago, The Pirate tells how the young wife of a fat dullard feasts on stories of an amorous pirate named Estramudo. A mountebank comes by, warms to the lady, tries to win her favor by claiming to be Estramudo. (Actually, her own husband is.) These and a lot of other old-fashioned absurdities of plot are blown up with old-fashioned extravagances of diction. Now & then a flash of wit serves for punctuation.

By working overtime, the Lunts manage to scrape off some Behrman rust. They also enliven the evening with a series of vaudeville acts. Actor Lunt dances, does magician's tricks, fakes tightrope walking. Actress Fontanne goes into a trance, does half a striptease. Two other characters indulge in a crap game. In view of all this, perhaps a decent script would be an intrusion.

The Great Big Doorstep (adapted by Frances Goodrich & Albert Hackett from the novel by E. P. O'Donnell; produced by Herman Shumlin) is a folk comedy about a ramshackle family of Cajuns in lower Louisiana. Its pleasant sliver of plot concerns their fishing a handsome doorstep out of the Mississippi and then trying to get a house to go with it.

The Great Big Doorstep is good quality but very short weight. Its jokes are funny but few, its characters likable but often dull. Its counterpart is Tobacco Road, but The Great Big Doorstep is much less racy and much less real. More than a doorstep, it needs some kind of backlog.

Yankee Point (by Gladys Hurlbut; produced by Edward Choate & Marie Louise Elkins) pecks at a dozen aspects of the war without getting its teeth in any of them. Playwright Hurlbut started with a card index instead of an idea. Her little community on the New England coast had to find room for a teen-age war bride, a chin-up war widow, an airplane spotter, a girl confused by pacifist upbringing, a World War I veteran who re-enlists, an old maid who finds a Nazi uniform buried in the dunes, the Nazi spy who buried it. For fear all this might be too meager, Playwright Hurlbut threw in a Nazi air raid.

Entertaining in spots, exciting in others, Yankee Point as a whole is glib and empty.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.