Testing Ground

Outwardly, the Bucks County Playhouse in New Hope, Pa., resembles its R.F.D. competitors. Built on the foundations of an 18th century mill, it hangs over a rushing stream, smells of pine, and usually has half a dozen fireflies in the audience. The difference begins at the footlights. Bucks County stands almost alone as a summer theater where the main interest is in new works. Six new plays are on Bucks County's 1961 schedule.

The first one, called The Interpreter, opened last week, and there, where Zsa Zsa Gabor might have been, stood the Premier of the Soviet Union agreeing with the President of the U.S. that the obvious winner of a Russian-American war would be Red China. The Soviet answer to that problem was a proposal that the U.S. and Russia form a military alliance and turn those 750 million "oversexed yellow rabbits" into so much jaundiced fallout. Written by Novice Playwright Eric Rudd and built around a 1970 summit conference, The Interpreter was as uneven as the Manhattan skyline. But its central, climactic scenes, played by a cast that includes Richard (Advise and Consent) Kiley, were alive with theatrical tension, swaying giddily on the brink of thermonuclear war.

The Interpreter may some day reach Broadway; but if it had opened there last week, it would have found a military alliance of critics waiting to blow it off the stage after one performance. And properly so, since in present form even the successful scenes are often better wrought than written. Now, however, as a result of a production policy altogether too rare in The Straw Hat, Playwright Rudd has an excellent chance to shape and refine his play, free from pressure, and with the indispensable experience of a first-rate professional staging behind him.

Slow Process. In seven years at Bucks County, Producer Michael Ellis has painstakingly developed the theater's reputation for original presentations, often losing money. Word is out that he reads new scripts, and they are now being stuffed into his mailbox at the rate of five a week.

To attract even more new playwrights, he pays the expenses of young unproduced dramatists who observe Bucks County plays in rehearsal. Ellis recalls that Life with Father was first produced in a summer theater near Skowhegan, Me., and his eye is clearly set on the box offices of Manhattan.

Raised in Wilkes-Barre, Pa., and educated at Dartmouth ('39), Ellis took his first five plays directly to Broadway, all losers. The last was a 1953 disaster called Two's Company (with Bette Davis) that sent him into retirement at the age of 35. He went to Bucks County and began the slow process of sifting new plays, giving them a hearing, keeping his operation alive with interlardings of safe old hits. Last summer, when Ellis produced Neil Simon's farce Come Blow Your Horn, he decided he was ready to return to Broadway. The play, which opened in February, got mixed reviews, but has since become a solid box office success; it has paid off its $120,000 nut and is now fattening with profits.

Prayer Wheel. This year's list may pay off even more handsomely. Ellis is testing everything from a melodrama about a New York widow who takes a cop as a lover to a sophisticated murder comedy about a married couple who independently decide to kill each other, turn a weekend into a hearse party when they keep dispatching the wrong victims.

Ellis' new plays are by new playwrights, with one notable exception: scheduled for September production is The Beauty Part, the first theatrical work since 1943's One Touch of Venus by Humorist S. J. Perelman. Starting with a number of his New Yorker pieces, Perelman is now at work, writing with Bert Lahr in mind (and perhaps Mike Nichols and Elaine May), exploring what he calls "the frightening notion that everybody has to be creative. The barber has to paint pictures. The housewife has to take ballet lessons. Nobody is happy unless he is creating something." Since Perelman is happy when he is creating nothing, and sometimes takes up to six months to do a comma, Producer Ellis was turning his prayer wheel last week, mumbling good omens such as "He had a preliminary talk with his typist today," and "Yesterday he used the word plot." While other Straw Hat producers were fretting about whether Margaret Truman would go over in The Time of the Cuckoo (Indianapolis) and whether Zsa Zsa Gabor was quite right for Blithe Spirit (Columbus), Bucks County's Michael Ellis at least had something worth worrying about.

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