New Play in Manhattan

Champagne Complex (by Leslie Stevens) concerns a young girl (Polly Bergen) who, after becoming engaged to a prim young tycoon (John Dall), constantly gets high on champagne and then begins peeling off her clothes. Her worried beau calls in his psychoanalyst bachelor uncle (Donald Cook). Treatments reveal that the girl wants the analyst himself as Cupid to her psyche. Since, in romantic comedies of the '50s, young girls may marry men in their 40s, all is well. Champagne Complex is that very tough undertaking--a play with but three characters and one situation. Despite amusing lines, funny moments, and more champagne drinking than in any stage work since The Merry Widow, the show is only spottily festive".' To prolong the journey from the psychoanalytic to the nuptial couch through three acts, the play has to detour, go in for vaudeville, toss dull cracks after bright ones, try to make the loud pedal sound like a new tune. The real honors go to Donald Cook. No one so deftly conveys well-bred distaste or alarm--looking as though he has just noticed a dead horse under the sideboard, or is about to hear a child of six recite.

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