New Plays in Manhattan

Challenge of Youth is a new and nauseating development of the ordeal by sex-problem. A professor's daughter in a small New England college town joins her friends in a league to combat the moral vigilance of their elders. Shortly thereafter her father inadvertently opens a door leading out of the front parlor and discovers her in the processes of sin. By the end of the play he feels he understands her better, has made a less romantic, more reasonable adjustment to life.

The supporting cast includes a boy who is fat without being funny and a shrilly unbearable girl-friend of the heroine. Playwrights Ashley Miller and Hyman Adler have introduced two theme songs, "Go's Tweet Patootie is Oo?" and "Let's Get What's To Be Gotten Now."

Josef Suss. The revenge plot, which occurred so often in early drama, is no longer considered exciting stuff. For revenge is stimulated by rage and rage is too direct and elementary an emotion to interest modern playgoers. Therefore this handsomely apparelled drama about a rich Jew of Wuerttemberg whose virginal daughter is driven to suicide by the approaches of a knavish Duke, and who subsequently causes the Duke's downfall by way of atonement, seems like mechanical puppetry. It is an adaptation by Ashley Dukes of episodes from Lion Feuchtwanger's potent novel Power (Jud Suss) which is extolled by its readers as the rich, devious history of a master of aggrandizement, a luxurious pageant of 18th Century Swabia, teeming with personalities. Actor Maurice Moscovitch, once famed in Manhattan's Yiddish theatres and more recently in London, has a few moments over the bier of his daughter when his voice is moving with tragic cadences. But you cannot forget that this is merely splendid histrionism, embellishing a void.

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