New Play in Manhattan

The Rope Dancers (by Morton Wishengrad) is that once-or-twice-a-season sort of play that is unsuccessful but "interesting." It introduces to Broadway a playwright who is almost struttingly grim, carrying larger-sized luggage than he can fill; but who seems altogether resolved to go his own way, even if he lose his way in the process. Laid in a turn-of-the-century Manhattan tenement, The Rope Dancers is a stubbornly harsh story of a lacerated family. Hard-working Margaret Hyland is a rigid, arrogant, unappeasably bitter woman with a lazy, feckless would-be writer of a husband (Art Carney) and an eleven-year-old daughter born with six fingers on one hand. Beyond having brought the girl up to feel like someone with two heads, and having kept her away from school and other children, Margaret -- while flaunting her contempt for her husband -- does not know how to convey her love to her child.

Margaret emerges no mere victim, no strong woman exacerbated by a weak husband and a hard fate. Hers is a willful, self-righteous strength gloating over weakness in others; hers is a puritan nature full of repressed sexuality and cankering resentments, and the conviction that what has happened is retribution for sin. Seen as a pathological figure, Margaret is valid and often effective. Moreover, the play highlights how abnormal she is by setting her against a blowzy, easygoing neighbor woman and a sane and knowledgeable neighborhood doctor. Yet, even in Siobhan McKenna's severe, unbending portrayal, Margaret seems something other than a dispassionate psychological study. Playwright Wishengrad has identified her with something in life itself, perhaps with something that gnaws at his own insides. He pushes on toward glib and rather grandiose tragedy, toward loud-pedaled moments that never quite ring true.

All this leads to a lessened response toward the characters, and to a confusion of values in the play. What exactly is east, and what is west, in Wishengrad's pessimistic geography? What is pathology, and what is sin, and what is determinism? In any case, the more he tries to expand or universalize, the more special seems his story.

But if fancily tragic, The Rope Dancers is nowhere facilely sentimental; it nowhere stoops to conquer. And beyond a certain feeling for character, 43-year-old Playwright Wishengrad in his first play has his own determined way of looking at things. Once he sees only what is there, it should prove rewarding.

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