New Plays in Manhattan

Ondine (adapted by Maurice Valency from the French of Jean Giraudoux) brings Audrey Hepburn again to Broadway--or rather, Audrey Hepburn brings Ondine there, as representing her choice from among many scripts. She will almost certainly become the acting sensation of the season, for in Ondine, she has found a part she can act out ravishingly, whether as water sprite or woman. But the part is far more beguiling than the whole. Despite its medieval stage color, its moments of pure enchantment, its other moments of pure Giraudoux, Ondine never quite gets off the ground--or out of the water.

In theory, the famed La Motte Fouque romance should suit the author of The Madwoman of Challlot to perfection. Giraudoux could delicately regild the tale of a sprite who loved and wed and herself became a mortal, only to return from a dismaying world to the deep, her knightly husband dead of her farewell kiss. Giraudoux could savor its melancholy turns and bitter twists, its clash between innocence and worldliness, its sense of mankind's dreams of perfection and descent into reality. And Giraudoux's own resolute but compassionate worldliness does touch Ondine with glints and flecks of gold. There are, too, bright-colored court scenes in which a magician conjures up events to come; there is a high-mannered court practicing the flatteries and-deceits that Ondine cries out against; in Mel Ferrer, there is a handsome knight for her to love; in Marian Seldes, a finely haughty rival whose hopes she dashes.

Adaptor Valency's English version is excellent prose. But dramatically, Ondine suffers from too much prose--or at any rate, too little poetry. Virgil Thomson's evocative incidental music suggests a tale better adapted to opera or ballet. For, however ironic and sophisticated, Giraudoux has not brought a new dimension, or even any very striking overtones, to an old story. What the tale gains in philosophical embroideries it more than loses in fairy-tale magic and lyrical feeling. It seems neither simple nor complex enough; in a certain prettiness and lifelessness, it suggests not the court magician but the court confectioner.

But however becalmed the lake, the spirit that darts out of it has a remote, quicksilverish witchery and wildness. Audrey Hepburn's is, quite literally, a mythical performance.

The Winner (by Elmer Rice) suggests a playwright ransacking his memory, as though it were a dresser drawer, for bits of plot. The search yields a rather weird assortment: an attractive cigar-counter girl who goes out to dinner with her customers but sees to it that she goes home alone, who is engaged to a married man, who suffers scandal without sin when another married man dies of a heart attack in her room, who inherits most of his money in his brand-new, last-minute will, who has to fight for the money in court, who wins it only to learn that it belongs to the Government in back taxes, and who then finds that the wealthy opposition lawyer is a suitor for her hand.

Such a string of ideas doesn't make matters particularly coherent or even faintly convincing. Worse yet, the play keeps shifting from romance to realism, from melodrama to comedy, and the heroine keeps going into moral huddles over the ethics of her inheritance. But she seems a pretty shabby creature for all that, with her abrupt shift of affections at the end, and not impressively moral for relinquishing one fortune in the act of marrying another.

The Winner is not quite a mess: in this, his 28th play, Rice is like a horse that knows the road so well he can stay on it even when the driver falls asleep. But he weaves and ambles, with no real sense of where he is going, and he offers such comic dialogue as "Would you hazard a guess as to the duration of the cogitational period?" As the heroine, Joan Tetzel can only be violent and affected as a way of seeming upset. As the successful suitor, Tom Helmore has far better methods of seeming nonchalant.

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