New Play in Manhattan

Second Threshold (by Philip Barry, with revisions by Robert E. Sherwood) was left not quite finished at Playwright Barry's death a year ago. The play itself is overcast with thoughts of death. It portrays the soul sickness of a distinguished public figure who has paid too heavily, in inner hardness and human loss, for the world's prizes. Even between him and the daughter he loves there is a gulf, now widened by her engagement to another such aging man of distinction as himself. Numb and parched, Josiah Bolton (Clive Brook) casts about for an unobtrusive way to die. But in time his daughter (Margaret Phillips) makes him feel her need of him.

Much of Second Threshold is written with Philip Barry's accustomed smoothness, his light talk glancing through the latticework of his troubled tale. The underlying theme is not new to Barry: more than once he pierced to the Puritan inside the worldling, the hair shirt beneath the dinner jacket. Barry was rather fascinated by the guilt that wouldn't come off the gingerbread. But in Second Threshold too much is not explained: Barry never really comes to grips with Bolton, nor Bolton with himself. And the play fishes in waters too dark to hook so flabby a solution.

The production is far from happy. Even its most talented performers fall short of themselves: Clive Brook's sufferings are too mannered, and Margaret Phillips, in a Katharine Hepburn-ish role, seems decidedly miscast.

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