New Plays in Manhattan

The Voice of the Turtle (by John van Druten; produced by Alfred de Liagre Jr.) offers the season's smallest cast and one of its gayest evenings. Playwright van Druten (There's Always Juliet, Old Acquaintance) has not only written a winning light comedy around just three people, but has even managed to suggest that three's a crowd. For youthful Actress Sally Middleton (Margaret Sullavan) and Sergeant Bill Page (Elliott Nugent) two is company, and good comedy at that.

Sergeant Bill, in Manhattan for a big weekend, is promptly ditched by his hot date (Audrey Christie), left high & dry in her friend Sally's flat (a living room, bedroom and kitchen that Scene Designer Stewart Chancy has expertly squeezed into a single set). Bill and Sally get acquainted: Bill is decent, down to earth, off love since it scorched him a few years back. Sally is sweet, self-dramatizing, off love since it scorched her a week ago Tuesday. Because it is raining and he is tired and has no hotel room, Bill spends Friday night on the living-room couch. He stays Saturday night too. By Sunday morning the caterpillar of sex has become the butterfly of love.

What gives this highly unremarkable tale its remarkable lift is no less its fidelity to life than its sense of fun. Though its comic edge is keen, Sally's and Bill's unconventional housekeeping is rich in bedspread and double-boiler touches that evoke delighted recognitions. And though lightly handled, Sally and Bill are pretty convincing people. Much of the comedy comes out of the piquant conflict of their own temperaments--out of Sally's young need to be dramatic and Bill's grown-up insistence on being downright. Their easy, sprightly, sometimes funny talk stays in character, is never primed with gags.

The production matches the play. Thirty-two-year-old Actress Sullavan, back on Broadway after six years in Hollywood, plays with skill, spirit and amazing youthfulness. Actor Nugent--beside whose naturalness a man in shirt sleeves with his feet on the desk seems posed--does a perfect job. And Actress Christie, as the trollop who gives Bill the goby, gives the play just the right touch of tabasco.

The World's Full of Girls (adapted by Nunnally Johnson from Thomas Bell's novel Till I Come Back to You; produced by Jed Harris). Nunnally Johnson, one of Hollywood's surest-footed scripters (The Grapes of Wrath, Holy Matrimony), slithers about rather badly on Broadway. The World's Full of Girls has nice dialogue, some pleasant scenes. But it suggests a wobbly coupling of two plays rather than a dramatization of one novel. Half of it portrays a large Brooklyn family addicted to quarrels and adorned "with quirks; the other half describes the punctured-and-repaired romance of two outsiders. And to his two stories that fail to intertwine Mr. Johnson adds two moods that refuse to coalesce. The World's Full of Girls is sometimes comedy, sometimes realism.

When Playwright Johnson in Hollywood heard about the play's weak notices he wired Producer Harris: "Change title immediately to Winged Victory."

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