New Play in Manhattan

Hilda Crane (by Samson Raphaelson; produced by Arthur Schwartz) is purely synthetic stuff, but it is chock-full of what a lot of people mean when they speak of a play. It dramatizes the problem of a woman--a woman twice married and divorced, passionate by nature, restless in spirit, divided in mind. In a chastened mood, she marries an admiring dullard she doesn't love, embraces a provincial and domestic existence that cannot last. The play possesses a full pack of such characters as the tough-minded mother (Beulah Bondi) and the son-worshiping mother-in-law (Evelyn Varden).

Hilda Crane is such stuff as matinees are made of--one of those middle-class studies in scarlet chronicled from the first sleeping partner to the final sleeping pills. It expertly works the old Belasco formula of being realistic in all its details and stagy in all its essentials. Far from being convincing, it is not really specific: the characters are all preshrunk types colliding in pretested situations. But though often banal, the play is seldom boring.

This is partly due to Jessica Tandy's highly resourceful performance as Hilda, reminiscent though it is of her Blanche in A Streetcar Named Desire. She portrays a woman full of inner violence and contradictory cravings, with overnight-hotel-room emotions that can find no permanent home. If she cannot really illuminate the part from within, outwardly she gives it an almost showy brilliance.

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