New Plays in Manhattan

The Number (by Arthur Carter; produced by Paul Vroom & Irving Cooper) has faults galore, but one very respectable virtue: it keeps its audience interested. Without offering anything very new, Playwright Carter has built up a good situation for melodrama, thrown in some characters that are tough, some twists that are lively, and even a surprise or two. In more expert hands, The Number might have excited audiences instead of merely interesting them.

The play tells of a respectable young woman (Martha Scott) who goes to work for a smooth, ruthless bookie (Murvyn Vye). Though his first rule is that employees may not go out with his customers (to avoid the temptation of putting their interests ahead of his), she disobeys and is soon caught up in a heavy love affair with a tough numbers player (Dane Clark). The two are found out, just at the moment when he legitimately wins a big bet, and the rest of the play is a saga of hideaways, getaways and gunfire. Actors Vye and Clark make persuasive evildoers. And though the evil that they do will not live after them, it carries The Number safely through the evening.

Barefoot in Athens (by Maxwell Anderson ; produced by the Playwrights Company) has Playwright Anderson once again raiding history for a hero. This time: Socrates.* It is not a very satisfactory sortie. Doubtless Socrates himself is partly to blame: however notable for dialogue, he was almost churlishly averse to drama. But Playwright Anderson is even more responsible. He has twisted Plato's Socrates into a symbol, thrust him into strange company, shown him off like a Hellenic quiz kid and, at moments, with quite unpoetic license, has wrenched him completely out of character and history out of focus.

Anderson's Socrates, as he moves about Athens, is humorous, misleadingly softspoken, exasperatingly inquisitive, relentlessly logical--so very much a gadfly that it's no wonder he was made into a scapegoat. And as played by English Actor Barry Jones, with brilliant ease and assurance, he takes on genuine personality. Raiding history a second time--for a theme--Anderson contrasts democracy in Athens with dictatorship in Sparta, a parallel with modern times that Anderson isn't the first to note. Though the point is well worth making, Socrates has to be lassoed into making it. Socrates' whole life is too exceptional, his whole method too ironic, for him to be a naturally crusading spokesman.

Barefoot has some good scenes and some good writing, but suffers even more from lack of sensibility and of art than from lack of drama. It has snatches of Shavian cleverness jostling scraps of Socratic wisdom and ponderous suggestions of The Private Life of Helen of Troy. A dramatically pointless harlot tags after a comic-strip King of Sparta; and in direct competition with perhaps the most nobly serene death scene in history, Anderson introduces one all his own. Dramatists rightly take liberties; but Drinkwater did not have Lincoln assassinated at Gettysburg, and Shaw refrained from having Joan devoured by lions.

* On other occasions: Queen Elizabeth, Mary of Scotland, Joan of Arc, George Washington.

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