New Plays in Manhattan

The Marriage-Go-Round (by Leslie Stevens) has three strings to its bow: Claudette Colbert, Charles Boyer and Julie Newmar. With their help, one of the season's crudest commodities may well become one of its most solid hits.

Actress Colbert and Actor Boyer play a happily married middle-aged couple--she a dean of women, he a professor of anthropology--in a small college town. At opposite ends of the stage they give cutey-cute lectures on marriage which, on a midstage merry-go-round-like set, they themselves help illustrate. As The Marriage-Go-Round's third or G-string, Actress Newmar plays an amply built Swedish blonde who. from out the whole world, has chosen Boyer to give her a child. Her body, she informs him, "is primed in readiness," nor is her use or adornment of it ever marred by reticence. While Colbert, who knows what's up, waits and wonders and attempts to act wise, Boyer first laughs off, then warns off, then fights off his Viking admirer, and then almost succumbs.

Of all plays, modern or ancient. The Marriage-Go-Round may well be the least given to digression. Here are sex and marriage, marriage and sex, with never a servant to interrupt, or a caller to intrude, or a child to compete; with not a moment's domestic small talk or campus chatter. So much single-mindedness, so many double meanings have a way--despite occasionally funny lines--of seeming both tedious and tawdry. Where The Marriage-Go-Round is not a Junoesque strip-tease on Actress Newmar's part, it becomes an attempted script-save on Colbert's and Boyer's. Their manner of saving it is to throw away as much of it as possible. What they give instead is an illustrated lecture--on the art of timing, of diversionary tactics, of seeming to fondle dialogue while carefully holding it at arm's length. Even they cannot too often succeed; and in any case there must, for two such delightful performers, be infinitely more profitable roles.

The Man in the Dog Suit (by Albert Beich and William H. Wright; based on Edwin Code's novel) originally wore it to a costume party. Normally a man with a mouse manner, he works in his wife's family bank and quails before the Babbitts and snobs and stuffed shirts in his wife's family. Then, all at once, he takes to wearing the dog suit as he chooses and begins to act out his daydreams. One time he bites a lady, another time a banker; he scandalizes the depositors, horrifies the in-laws he hates, disturbs the wife he loves. Suddenly the bank bids him choose: "The desk or the dog suit!"

As a stage piece. The Man in the Dog Suit is not without virtues. Hume Cronyn brings to the title role the sort of skill that can dramatize a problem and humanize a scene, and Jessica Tandy is engaging as the wife. Some of their scenes together flash with intensity as well as theater; Carmen Mathews has a funny interlude as a drunk; scattered moments are touching or sharp. But the man in the dog suit is the same man who has wooed conformity to win security, who has shaken with fright and then shaken himself free, in a dozen earlier tales. Every in-law who is not a mere caricature is a safe cliche; every point is made twice; realistic satire keeps dwindling into formula or crashing into farce. And in his way of finally rebelling against the bank, the hero is really succumbing to popular theater. What the authors should have remembered to chant each time they settled down to work was. "The desk and the dog suit"--the satiric pen in a more adventurous hand.

Patate (adapted by Irwin Shaw from the French of Marcel Achard) was a big Paris hit, though nothing in the quickly folding Broadway version seemed to link it with Paris at all. It is a tale of two men, a heel who has grown rich and his down-at-heel patate or fall guy. When Patate learns that the heel has become his adopted daughter's lover, he at last has a chance to even up the score; but as top dog, he proves the worst flop of all.

In Patate on Broadway, France and the U.S. succeeded in rubbing elbows with a spectacular avoidance of funnybones. Jokes congealed, situations evaporated; Tom Ewell, as Patate, gamely struggled and sank. Perhaps more things were involved than just differing national brands of humor: matters of language and production, the speed at which light comedy travels, the split second in which a fleeting fancy can be trapped. Whatever the cause, the fun of Patate remained incommunicado throughout.

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