New Plays in Manhattan

In the Summer House (by Jane Bowles) takes place on a dreamlike section of the Southern California coast, and contrasts the happy-animal life of a gaggle of Mexicans with the mental distress of half a dozen Americans in just about every stage of neurotic obsession. Widowed Judith Anderson, the undisputed queen of this domain, is superbly in command from the very start. Like a Freudian Madame Defarge, she knits in purposeful accompaniment to the sound of her own voice falling like a cleaver on her tremble-chinned daughter (Elizabeth Ross), who peeps in terror from a vine-enclosed summerhouse across the garden. Even marriage to a Saroyanesque young man (Logan Ramsey) fails to save the daughter, for she feverishly builds a homey womb away from home in a trellised corner booth of her husband's bar. The play's uncertain note of affirmation is sounded when Elizabeth finally flees to St. Louis with her husband, rejecting her mother's hysterical offer of a newer, better and even more insulated garden house.

Playwright Bowles's plot (complicated by a fatal accident offstage) and point (life must progress from fakery to reality) are the feeblest parts of her drama. But she wins high marks for theatricality and comic invention. Each of the five scenes is beautifully placed and paced. They are peopled with some fine original types, notably Mildred Dunnock as a tiptoeing mother who achieves a boozy sublimation after the death of her jet-propelled offspring (Muriel Berkson), Jean Stapleton, a triumphantly fun-loving barmaid, and Martita Reid, a Mexican dowager of sufficient force to faze even indomitable Actress Anderson. Director Jose Quintero has caught some memorable vignettes: a beach picnic, as airily languid as the colored soap bubbles blown by a Mexican girl, and a muddled wedding party, alive with tears and frayed tempers. Oliver Smith's scenery and the music composed by the playwright's husband, Paul Bowles, are nicely in key with the disturbing childhood memories that are the play's evanescent strength.

The Remarkable Mr. Pennypacker (by Liam O'Brien) has a likable air and funny interludes, but its fun is fitful, so that the play must be described as not a bad evening rather than a really good one.

A period comedy laid in Wilmington, Del. in 1890, it concerns a middle-class father of eight with advanced views. Horace Pennypacker is a freethinker who wears knickerbockers rather than trou sers, and belongs to societies espousing Darwin and dedicated to persuading Bernard Shaw to visit America. He also, it soon transpires, is the father of nine children by a different wife in Philadelphia.

To Horace, pursuing high aims at high altitudes, bigamy is a mere narrow-minded epithet, and the feelings of his Wilmington wife (Martha Scott), on hearing the Philadelphia story, are to be placated by friendly words and a few flowers. Necessarily, there are bourgeois complications. Yet, as played with gusto by Burgess Meredith, Mr. Pennypacker is no less a devoted family man for having one family too many, and no less a man of principle for having principles all his own. The whole play is geared to the level of farce; but though the level is sustained, the leverage falters. Mr. Pennypacker can never quite settle down to being funny. At times, the play has Horace hilariously on the spot; at other times, Horace has orthodox behavior, and even monogamy, by the tail. But there is too much joking for such a moderate-sized joke, and sometimes the merest commotion is substituted for comedy. Despite a good try at the end, Mr. Pennypackers predicament is never really unscrambled.

Sing Till Tomorrow (by Jean Lowenthal) folded after the most Scrooge-like reviews within yuletide memory. The Herald Tribune's Walter Kerr objected with equal irritation that half the play could not be heard and the other half could. Brooks Atkinson of the Times described the play as "solemn gibberish." Sing Till Tomorrow was worse than just plain bad: it was fuzzily and pretentiously so, and with acting that matched the script. Involved were a druggist, his second wife and his son, who sinned with the wife and wrote a play attacking the father. "His pitch is a stammer to the far-flung stars" is a fair sample of how the characters addressed one another; and their lives seemed as curiously--and often as needlessly--tortured as their language.

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