New Plays in Manhattan

Flight to the West (by Elmer Rice, produced by The Playwrights' Co.) is the first Broadway play to deal with the world crisis since Robert Sherwood's "There Shall Be No Night." Its functional if unexciting scene is the interior of a transatlantic Clipper during a Lisbon-New York flight. The interior, is so faithfully reproduced that old Clipperites might expect genial Captain Bill Winston to wander in and begin expounding his sure-fire method of winning at roulette.

For mise enscene it beats the transatlantic voyage in the cinema's Foreign Correspondent.

It nevertheless takes much more than heightened scenic effect to give a play dramatic power. During most of two acts of Flight to the West it is a series of recitations rather than drama. The sentiments are those ubiquitous in anti-Nazi journalism.

There is palaver between a liberal writer and a Nazi diplomat, and the story of a refugee Jewess. There is a quarrel between a pregnant bride, eager for placid home life, and her Jewish husband who has a confused desire for some active role in Democracy's defense. At length, after what seems hours of talk, a Belgian woman, whose husband has been blinded and her child maimed by German bombs, becomes momentarily crazed and attempts to shoot the Nazi emissary--something that would never happen on Bill Winston's Pan American Clipper. The bullet wounds the young Jewish husband. Toward the end the liberal author reaches the conclusion that "rational madness" of the Nazis will eventually be overcome by the ''irrational sanity" of their enemies, which is at least a nice phrase.

The cast is excellent, especially Eleonora Mendelssohn as the sad, contained Jewess, Paul von Hernreid as the prideful Nazi, and Betty Field as the war-sick bride. But Playwright Rice is so anti-Nazi that the play has a flat taste, like propaganda.

The Flying Gerardos (by Kenyon Nicholson & Charles Robinson, produced by Edward Choate) consists of amiable horseplay about -a crisis which strikes a trapeze act while they are quartered in a horse doctor's house during a Brooklyn carnival run. A spindly graduate student of Columbia University falls in love with the troupe's ingenue and she threatens to quit the act for culture and her bookworm, which would deprive the brainless aerialists of their most attractive piece of ignorance.

Florence Reed gives a raucous portrayal of the defiantly ignorant leader of the troupe. The argument for the body, as against the mind, is heavily weighted by the appearance of blonde Lois Hall, as the ingenue, in a variously colored succession of tights. But the play's comic never approaches its physical appeal.

The Lady Who Came To Stay (by Kenneth White, based on a novel by R. E. Spencer, produced by Guthrie Mc-Clintic) relates the dreadful events in "the upstairs sitting room of the Garvis home," a ponderous, gloomy Victorian chamber. Here three weird maiden sisters --one of them an unspeakable witch in a bathrobe--live in apparently acute sex frustration with their widowed, musical sister-in-law and her daughter. Finally the last of the weirds, afraid of becoming more so, decides to burn the house down.

A fine cast including Mady Christians as the arsonist, Evelyn Varden as the ghastly in the bathrobe, and a splendid child actor, Dickie Van Patten, can do little with this absurd charade which would make the Henry James of The Turn of the Screw whirl in his grave.

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