New Plays in Manhattan

Claudia (by Rose Franken, produced by John Golden) is a bride of a year (Dorothy McGuire) whose architect husband (Donald Cook) has established her in a Connecticut farmhouse de luxe. She is also childishly established in an attachment to her mother. It takes pregnancy and the knowledge that her mother has an incurable cancer to begin to grow Claudia up.

These are the bare bones of a play that rests entirely, and not very solidly, on characters and moods. It has every asset as to cast--and the very young, very Irish beauty of Dorothy McGuire would focus anyone's attention on the heroine. But Playwright Franken, a veteran ladies' magazine fictioneer, either does not know or thinks it would not be nice to reveal that what she is handling is the very serious subject of adult infantilism. Claudia's unhealthy immaturity remains masked for three acts behind a screen of tedious, relentless Ladies' Home Journal cuteness.

Out Of The Frying Pan (by Francis Swann, produced by William Deering & Alexander Kirkland). In this foolish little item a group of ambitious young theatre people impersonate a group of ambitious young theatre people trying to interest the producer who lives downstairs. By the time they have acted a burlesque crime play for him, there have been more accidents and horseplay than there are at an American Legion convention. There are dozens of laughs for easy laughers. Sample: "An opportunity like that, and he didn't goose her!--he's in love." Sounder chuckles come when the producer (Reynolds Evans), a solemn amateur chef, rapturously breathes out his formula for the preparation of gumbo. Making her Broadway debut in the play is Designer Norman Bel Geddes' daughter Barbara, 18, who should continue to do well in parts requiring a plump, pleasant young person with a babyish voice. But father Geddes, who preferred Barbara as Amy in last summer's Little Women at Clinton, Conn., has a different design for her, wants her to go back to school--for a while.

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