New Plays in Manhattan

Theatre

The Good Fairy. After samples of how inept Viennese comedy can be (I Love An Actress, A Church Mouse), the season has at last afforded the genuine article by the maestro who holds the controlling interest in that branch of contemporary drama --Ferenc Molnar.

In The Good Fairy, Lu (Helen Hayes) describes herself as ''an unemployed glow-worm," which means that she is a cinemansion usheress out of work. She meets a rich industrialist who wants her for his mistress. Spectators are asked to believe that Lu likes the idea largely because she will be able to become the benefactress of some unknown man, anybody. From her chrysalis the big-hearted glowworm emerges as a good fairy. She picks up a telephone directory, looks up the name of a lawyer, tells her patron that he is her husband and that she will expect the patron to do the handsome thing for him.

The man whom she has picked to befriend turns out to be a fusty, impoverished old codger (Walter Connolly) whose sense of honor recoils at first from the idea. But the glowworm eventually convinces him. Unhappily, Lu does not feel obliged to make everybody happy. She goes off with a head waiter instead of her industrialist.

At this point Producer Gilbert Miller steps out in front of the curtain and pays a somewhat backhanded compliment to his audience. He says that he has asked Herr Molnar to write a more enlightening sequel for the U. S. edition of the play. The sequel shows the characters ten years later. Lu has married. Whom? Naturally the last one of the six male characters you would expect.

Miss Gulliver Travels gives a number of actors the opportunity of dressing up in oldtimey costumes and smacking their lips over some colored water which is supposed to be bourbon and ale. It relates the adventures of a troupe of mummers who barnstorm the U. S. circa 1811. Big scene occurs when they give Romeo and Juliet in Washington, D. C. before President James Madison. Here the reunited lovers score a triumph not repeated by Miss Gulliver Travels.

In Times Square, like the well-remembered Cock Robin and The Last Warning, is a backstage murder play. A drama is being rehearsed, during which a man is shot as he vanishes through a trap door. He emerges in the audience unhurt. Then another man, coming through the audience, is fired on. It turns out that he is not killed either. Finally someone really is shot, but by this time the whole business has become too silly for you to care much one way or another.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.