New Plays in Manhattan

Mademoiselle Colombe (adapted by Louis Kronenberger-from the French of Jean Anouilh) is an amorality play written in Gallic terms, i.e., the playwright never reveals whom he is rooting for. This has proved dismaying to Broadway audiences in the past because, though relishing a good fight between right and wrong, U.S. playgoers prefer to know which is which. Opposed in the turn-of-the-century plot are Eli Wallach, a young man top-heavy with virtue, and his wife Julie Harris, who cannot see why he must do everything the hard way when the easy way is so much more fun. Called up for military service, Wallach nobly refuses to seek deferment, even though it means he must reluctantly deposit his wife with his termagant mother (Edna Best), one of the great ladies of the Paris theater.

In the hothouse atmosphere of backstage life, Julie experiences a forced growth. So much so that when her husband returns to Paris he discovers that, in only three months, she has become a minor actress and he a major cuckold. It is in dealing with this most ancient crime against man that the play finds its cynical laughter, stagy tears and best scenes: Sam Jaffe is shockingly funny as he recites the litany of despairs that afflict deceived husbands, and Actress Harris is painfully enchanting as she lies and charms away her husband's suspicions.

Through and around these scenes sweeps Edna Best, wearing a stomacher, a red wig and a putty nose. Though a skilled actress, she is miscast and overplays the vulgarity of her role as she declaims fake-heroic verses, shouts uncomfortably ribald asides, and trails behind her a retinue of hairdressers, manicurists and poets. William Windom and Harry Bannister are effective as youthful and aged incarnations of women-chasers. Superbly costumed by Motley, Colombe is played against Boris Aronson's fine settings--a gauzy, grey-and-golden evocation of the Paris of yesteryear. The language of the Kronenberger adaptation has a French clarity as well as an Anglo-Saxon bluntness.

In Colombe, as in so many of his other plays (Legend for Lovers, Cry of the Peacock), Anouilh has looked at the face of Love and found once again that it mirrors little more than self-gratification. In its alternations of farce and tragedy, flamboyance and reserve, sweetness and acid, Colombe is as colorful as a pousse cafe. But, like a pousse cafe, it may not be to everyone's taste.

His and Hers (by Fay & Michael Kanin) uses a comic framework as neat and narrow as a coffin. Written by a pair of playwrights who are married, it concerns a pair who are divorced (after two Broadway failures). In a freak legal wrangle, because they have both thought up a play with the same plot, they get a court order to write it together. Propinquity makes hearts grow fonder, and they decide, if the new play clicks, to remarry. Then they decide that love outweighs success. and to remarry whatever happens.

On any realistic basis, two people so bitten with the success bug would find love only a momentary antidote. On a purely comic basis, His and Hers never really gets off the ground. So little free will is allowed the plot that something specially gay is needed in the writing; and the writing is so metallic as to seem mirthless. Beyond pleasant performances by Celeste Holm and Robert Preston, His and Hers offers only a certain smoothness.

-TIME'S drama critic, but not the writer of this review.

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