New Plays in Manhattan

The Flowering Peach (by Clifford Odets) tells, very much in its own way, the story of Noah. His scene a kind of historical no man's land--so long as there is any land--Odets chronicles a family whose habits and dress seem less Biblical than bohemian and who, with their slangy ways, seem more modern than ancient.

They are perhaps meant to seem agelessly racial. Noah may be hooted at when he first reveals God's warning of the Flood; but he is to be feared and obeyed, and can force a reluctant Japheth--who resents God's cruelty in letting other men drown--into the Ark. Odets tells, too, of family weaknesses: a Noah who drinks, a Ham who wenches, a Shem who loves money, and of a cooped-up family's bickerings. But these people also have their loyalties and affections, and out of the Flood a despotic Noah learns humility.

The play has its pleasant, kindly and vigorous scenes. On occasion, too, there is a certain piquancy to its childlike scramblings of time and place. As Noah, Menasha Skulnik (The Fifth Season) is not only engaging and funny, but touching and dignified; and Berta Gersten can be funny and touching as his sour-sweet wife.

Mordecai Gorelik's sets are cleanly pictorial, and Feder's lighting is inspired.

But if the play's garbling of eras is harmless, its juggling of levels is not.

Odets has given the play no basic style: neither the vivid folkishness that The Green Pastures brought to the Bible nor the Main Street flavor The Golden Apple gave to Homer. The Flowering Peach is sometimes gently philosophic, sometimes folkish. sometimes straight domestic comedy, and at its broadest, borscht-belt farce. What it displays is a meandering fancy rather than a fused vision.

As storytelling, moreover, The Flowering Peach runs aground even before the rains have ceased. The characters' little habits become drearily habitual; the philosophizings employ too many and too unmagical words; the squabbles merely repeat themselves. Odets falls into a common trap: he cannot convey the peevish boredom of his floating prison without turning boresome himself. But what stems in part from lack of movement stems from lack of meaning also. Writing his play on an intellectual milk diet. Odets tries vainly for the rich ferment of wine.

When he was 39, Menasha Skulnik was settled in Manhattan, playing Yiddish musicomedy roles in the Second Avenue Theater. At last he saved enough money to bring, his mother to New York from Poland, and one night bought her a front-row seat. It was her first reckoning with show business since her son ran away from home at eight to become an actor. After the performance, Menasha took his mother to one side. "Well, Mama, what do you think?" Said Mama, with hushed astonishment: "From this you make a living?"

Mama never got used to the idea that being laughed at could pay off. But Menasha loved it. For 18 years he was the mainstay of the Second Avenue house. True, the shows had a conveyorbelt sameness about them: Menasha (who usually wrote and directed) always played a schlemiel or a schnook--the little bumbling fellow who is kicked around, and yet somehow musters enough wit in the last act to win out. The story was usually laced with peasant-stock sex and plenty of slapstick, mugging, shuffling, shrugging and asides. The shows seldom failed; the audiences, fed by thousands of Jewish immigrants to the Lower East Side, always had a good time with Menasha.

Skulnik's debut on Broadway was a long time coming. For years, he says, the Broadway theatrical writers were always saying that his Second Avenue plays were not up to Menasha's capabilities. Then two seasons ago, he took his first English-speaking Broadway role: a cloak and suit manufacturer in the hit play The Fifth Season ("I was 75% Skulnik, 25% character"). Still, the reviewers claimed the play was not up to Menasha. After watching four performances, Playwright Odets asked him to read The Flowering Peach.

A look at the first scene convinced Skulnik that "it would be an honor." Now 59, Skulnik says: "This is the hardest role I ever had. The part is the longest on Broadway. I start in one mood and have to change like a juggler. Always changing I am. Now it's 25% Skulnik and 75% character." Anastasia (adapted from the French of Marcelle Maurette by Guy Bolton) has a nice counterfeit ring to it that proves very welcome. Reviving the tale that when the Bolsheviks shot the Czar and his family, one daughter escaped, Anastasia goes back even farther in history for its storytelling than for its story. It is unabashedly gaudy theater stuffed with snob appeal, sentimental melodrama, bad writing, bravura acting, and a whopping second-act Big Scene. As sheer escape from reality it puts Anastasia's from the Bolsheviks to shame.

Laid in Berlin in 1926, the play tells of some rascals who, knowing that a huge fortune of the Czar's is banked in Sweden, plot to rig up a claimant for it. They find one in a waiflike sick girl who has insisted, in a Bucharest hospital, that she is Princess Anastasia. Real or not, after being coached she passes muster with people who once knew Anastasia. But the great test is with the Dowager Empress, Anastasia's grandmother. This is also the great scene, and it is not only played to the hilt but even strikes, once or twice, to the heart. As the claimant, Viveca Lindfors is attractive and tremulous; as the Empress, Eugenie Leontovich invokes the grand manner imperially, without ever burlesquing it.

It would perhaps be unfair to divulge what follows: enough that, thanks to the play's noble-minded finale, history--unlike parts of Anastasia--calls for no rewriting.

But it is good fun. If the villains rather lack polish and the love interest decidedly lacks glow, the other trappings are suitably choice. Coronets consistently outrank kind hearts; Czarist Russia vies favorably with Graustark. Anastasia is a true catharsis of hokum and highfalutin: for a week afterwards, the spectator wants to hear of nobody more illustrious than a shoe clerk.

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