New Plays In Manhattan

Ring Round the Moon (translated from the French of Jean Anouilh by Christopher Fry; produced by Gilbert Miller) is as French as a duel in the Bois, and as airy and evanescent as skywriting. A "charade with music," it assembles a fashionable group for a ball at a chateau where not only the guests, but their words, their wit, their desires, their very frustrations are expected to dance. With its adroit Christopher Fry translation, evocative Poulenc music, elegant Dufy curtain scrawls, charming 1912 Castillo costumes, Ring Round the Moon comes in the most inviting of envelopes--which proves a little hard on the letter inside.

What story Ring boasts concerns a cold-blooded young man-about-town who hires a pretty young nobody (Stella Andrew) to come to the ball in the hope that she can bewitch his sensitive twin brother out of the clutches of a selfish heiress. What with being so ignominiously employed and with falling in love with her callous employer, the girl has a miserable evening. But if she is wretched from being poor and in love and not in society, so are most of those who are rich and in society and not really in love, who go yawning through fairyland, yearning for adventure, or poverty, or the past.

Anouilh pursues his characters with mockery that is a little wistful, with sympathy that is a little malign, now capriciously making romance look grey, now perversely making reality seem gilded. At the end he casually mates the characters and whisks them out of sight like so many folding chairs. He skims over a world where things cut two ways and cancel one another out. He is very civilized, possibly overcivilized: the sort of man who would add s'il vous plait to the Ten Commandments.

Ring Round the Moon has a measure of wit along with its grace, and a tango scene that deigns to be altogether hilarious. In a generally good production, Lucile Watson is amusing as the ball's aristocratic wheelchaired hostess, Denholm Elliott smooth and agile as both twin brothers, and Oscar Karlweis suavely despondent as an unwilling millionaire. But Ring Round the Moon seems frequently garrulous and increasingly tenuous and a little too complacently impromptu. The whole effect is rather like finding a filmy handkerchief with a ravishing scent and searching in vain for its owner.

The Golden State (by Samuel Spewack; produced by Bella Spewack) is a hack comedy that sinks even that bounciest and most cork-brained of comediennes, Josephine Hull. Playwright Spewack sets out to kid California's well-known ambition to be El Dorado when, it grows up. Actress Hull plays a hopeful landlady who, through a Spanish ancestor, lays property claims to all of Beverly Hills. Ernest Truex plays a hopeful prospector who thinks he discovers gold in Miss Hull's back yard and makes frenzied forty-niners of the other roomers.

The whole thing is shoddily fitted out with desperate gags, limp and feeble bits of farce, and characters who make depressing conversationalists. As satire on an ill-advised lust for money, it is merely the potboiler calling the kettle black.

Pride's Crossing (by Victor Wolfson; produced by T. Edward Hambleton) penetrates a stately New England mansion to the tempestuous life within. There, out of a diseased respect for respectability, an aristocratic matron (Mildred Dunnock) has lived with her husband and his spitfire stable-girl mistress (Tamara Geva). There, after the husband dies and leaves half the house to the wildcat, the widow lives on with her still. The spitfire's son, the widow's son, her son's son and a governess also inhabit the house where, between heart attacks and thunderstorms, the tying of children to chairs and the choking of adults on sofas, everyone dresses for dinner.

Pride's Crossing--which closed at week's end--had moments of crude power and baleful atmosphere. But it was for the most part solemnly empty and luridly dull--all pedal and no piano.

The Tower Beyond Tragedy (by Robinson Jeffers) is the first of ten productions that the American National Theater and Academy plans to offer on Broadway this season. What is mostly the matter with the first of their plays is that it seldom seems like a play at all. It is merely an undynamic stage treatment of Jeffers' well-known dramatic poem on the House of Atreus. Though it chronicles the matricide of Clytemnestra, the murders of Agamemnon, Aegisthus and Cassandra, and more than dabbles in adultery and incest, it is too choked by imagery ever to ignite, is too highbustedly declamatory ever to terrify.

Judith Anderson--who, on opening night, went on just after hearing the news of her mother's death--is very often sulphurous and always stage-dominating as Clytemnestra; but the role itself is generally so static that it compels the actress to become on occasion stagy. Beyond that, there are brief flashes of drama, bright snatches of language, and good moments (along with bad) of stage spectacle. Of many deeds unspeakable and atrocious has Pelops' line been many times accused; but perhaps never before of simply being dull.

Edwina Black (by William Dinner & William Morum; produced by Donald Flamm) dies, just before the play opens, of arsenic poisoning. Surviving are an unfaithful husband (Robert Harris), a companion-secretary (Signe Hasso) he has been unfaithful with, and a devoted servant. A Scotland Yard man arrives, scrutinizes, interrogates, looks for clues, makes much of weedkiller, mutters about hand lotion, deliberates, deduces, turns up trumps, unravels.

Edwina doesn't come to a bad end: the solution is tolerably ingenious. But it comes to it by a tedious route in a pretty lumbering conveyance. The Scotland Yard man furthermore insists on going over every inch of the way; and the lovers, both of whom are understandably suspect, become understandably and loquaciously suspicious of each other. The whole thing is blameless enough. But it remains a terribly staid, genteel British whodunit that almost never sets the brain aracing, the spine atingle or the mouth agape.

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