New Plays in Manhattan

Me and Molly (by Gertrude Berg; produced by Oliver Smith & Paul Feigay, Herbert Kenwith and David Cummings) makes stage figures of those long-popular radio voices, The Goldbergs.

Laid in The Bronx in 1919, the play chronicles life in a Jewish family. In an atmosphere of neighbors and noise, Mrs. Goldberg (Playwright Berg) tackles her ABCs at night school; her daughter Rosie starts taking music lessons; her son Sammy prepares for his bar mitzvah. But Me and Molly chiefly concerns the efforts of Mr. Goldberg (Philip Loeb) to set up in business for himself--a shaky venture that, thanks to Mrs. Goldberg, at the end seems likely to prosper.

Me and Molly is, artistically, the same composite of lower and middle class that the Goldbergs are socially. It stands where dialect humor and realistic observation meet--or, more frequently, collide; where characters are a little more than exploited but a great deal less than explained. Atmospherically, the whole thing benefits from a certain warmheartedness; as a human being, Playwright Berg shows her characters a respect that she withholds from them as a writer. But what's worst about her as a writer--what makes her play first commonplace and then dull--is that she's not one.

Where Stars Walk (by Micheal MacLiammoir; produced by Richard Aldrich & Richard Myers, in association with Brian Doherty) is the Dublin Gate Theater's third Broadway production and first wholly inside job. Written by one of the Gate's two founders and star performers, the play isn't really much good but it is often exceedingly pleasant. Half fantasy and half satire, in its dawdling as well as its dreaming it is altogether Irish.

The scene is the Dublin drawing room of Sophia Sheridan (stylishly played by Meriel Moore), a retired actress who is helping a local little theater group do a play about Ireland's legendary Princess Etain and her faery lover Midir. But while these people are languidly puttering around with legend, the real Etain and Midir (nicely played by Helena Hughes and Playwright MacLiammoir) are working as Mrs. Sheridan's parlormaid and houseman. Immortals who have strayed far & long from fairyland, they go back to it, hand in hand, at the end.

The play gets its best results by reaching not across the centuries but across the Irish Sea: it does a juicy job on a London chatter columnist whose skin is even thicker than his skull. Unfortunately the Londoner, like much else in the play, turns up for no reason--and turns up twice.

Despite a real knack for phrasemaking and some fine whimsical Irish fun, Where Stars Walk hasn't the faintest sense of direction, nor the slightest conception of time.

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