New Plays in Manhattan

Fair Game (by Sam Locke) concerns a very young, fetching and modest-budgeted divorcee who comes to New York to study at City College. She is soon modeling size tens in the garment center as well, with half the members of the garment trade making very forward passes. But she straight-arms them one and all, and overeager professors too; and after one near slip because of temporary despondency, she finds that the offers of mink stoles are changing into proposals of marriage.

One of those breezy, mass-aimed, gag-and-garter comedies that now and then run for a year or more, Fair Game boasts a decidedly helpful production. Sam Levene is a deft low-comedy actor, Ellen McRae a fresh and attractive heroine, Robert Webber a likably convincing hero. They endow the show's better scenes with life and laughs, and Playwright Locke has a knack for bright broad lines. But bad hobbles after good, and crude latches onto clever in a shamelessly oversolicitous, never-change-the-subject exploitation of the girl-who-cries-wolf theme. Fair Game not only tosses in every gimmick, it usually tosses it in twice. And it not only spells out every word, it has a resolutely meager vocabulary.

The Square Root of Wonderful (by Carson McCullers) obviously stems from a writer of talent. But in Square Root the talent seems in hopeless disarray. The author of The Member of the Wedding has written on a variety of themes, in a variety of tones, at a variety of tempos. Possessing sufficient material for several plays, Square Root, for lack of integration, largely comes off no play at all. It makes plain throughout, not least by way of hate, that the square root of wonderful is love. Its parts are not only greater than the whole; they also destroy the whole.

With three of its characters evoking Tennessee Williams' Glass Menagerie, the play has also the three-pronged subject matter of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. An elderly, genteelly despotic Southern mother has badly hurt her daughter and her son--the daughter is an all-tied-up-in-knots old maid; the son a psychotically bitter, frustrated writer. The son has in turn badly hurt the simple girl (Anne Baxter) who twice, from sheer sexual compulsion, became his unhappy wife. Divorced now, he comes from a mental home to break in upon her romance with an uncomplicated architect. All the time, amid such a fracturing of lives, people sit about, exhibiting the farcical side of family life.

The farce moments can be entertaining and brightly cockeyed. The old maid daughter (well played by Martine Bartlett) is both amusing and touching. The son's outbursts can have a mad-dog howl and bite. But so abruptly do things shift focus, so wildly do they change tone, that farce firecrackers negate real bullets, and virtues are turned into faults. Where, by a stylized atmosphere and a sardonic inflection, Waltz of the Toreadors could mate humor with horror, lace wormwood with Vichy. Square Root jangles with false notes. Where, again, Williams could make a dynamic--if uncentered--story of Cat, could drive abreast the three themes of a blighted marriage, a parent-and-child relationship and a girl's family-in-law, Square Root cannot drive them tandem.

Unhappily, in the attempt to do so, Carson McCullers' brilliant individuality and special feeling for life have been clouded and blurred. Aided by a sensitive production, The Member of the Wedding was a successful mood play. With a much less helpful production, Square Root is all clash of moods. Though plainly the object is to deplore complicated neurotic love, the wrecked marriage is treated too realistically for a play with so special an angle of vision. Again, though the object is to exalt simple feeling, the love story is so romantically colorless as to leave no angle of vision at all. What generally emerges is a square root in a round hole.

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