New Plays in Manhattan

Pride and Prejudice (adapted by Helen Jerome; Max Gordon, producer;. Nothing in this show is below par except the antiques which dress the Regency setting for Jane Austen's marital sweepstakes. Playwright Jerome has caught in her script a goodly quantity of Novelist Austen's sly, introverted wit, and Director Robert Sinclair has seen that a splendid cast of actors conduct themselves with all the foolish elegance and witless frivolity of the period.

The five husband-hungry Bennet girls of Pride and Prejudice have, for theatrical purposes, been reduced to three. Left are

Lydia, who elopes with Captain Denny; Jane (Helen Chandler), who goes into a decline when pretty Charles Bingley temporarily deserts her; and Elizabeth (Adrianne Allen), whose sharp tongue and unfashionably candid ways finally ensnare the rich and haughty Darcy (Colin Keith-Johnston). Actress Chandler, the blonde and tremulous wife of Actor Bramwell Fletcher, and Actress Allen, the brown-haired, vivacious mate of Actor Raymond Massey, have been given no easy task in making Pride and Prejudice march. An extravagant admirer of Jane Austen's quiet, domestic observations was Sir Walter Scott, who declared: "I can do the big bowwow myself: but the exquisite touch ... is denied to me." Most 20th Century playgoers lean toward the big bowwow. Accordingly, they might reasonably be expected to yawn at characters whose menfolk's tights and neckwear make them look like bullfrogs about to spring, whose every silly sentence twists toward rarefied romance, and who employ three acts and much superfluous palaver in the basically simple process of going out and getting married. Nevertheless, all concerned in the dramatization do manage to supply, if not an exciting, at least a quiet, chuckly evening in the theatre. Let Freedom Ring (adapted by Albert Bein; Bein & Goldsmith, producers) is another blow at industrial Bondage & the Bosses. Like most radical literature, "agitprop" drama seems curiously limited not only as to symbolism but as to narrative. The humble workers take it on the chin for a couple of acts, then stage a strike during which the hero is killed. The finale still finds the strike unsettled, but homegoing playgoers are given the impression that a desirable proletarian militancy has been aroused and better days are probably ahead for the workers of the world.

Of such stuff Let Freedom Ring is made. This time the workers are Carolina mountain folk, well observed by Novelist Grace Lumpkin in her To Make My Bread and well transplanted behind the footlights by Adapter Bein. The mountain folk, frozen out of their hill homes one cold winter, go down to town to work in the cotton mills. There life as "lint heads" is far from the fine things they expected. Tuberculosis gets the men while those women whom pellagra spares are tempted to eke out a living from the wages of sin.

The clan under consideration in Let Freedom Ring is named McClure and is made of tougher fibre than most. Grandpappy ''fit the Yankees," who left three sabre slashes in his side. His daughters had been starved out of their birthplace only when nothing remained to eat except the dog. When his daughters and grandchildren finally revolt against wage cuts in the mill, Grandpappy supplies comic relief with his truculent ways and squirrel rifle. And when the best of his brood is finally pinked on the picket line. Grandpappy sings a hillbilly hymn of hate at the big funeral scene:

Let them wear their golden watches And their pearly strings. When our day of judgment comes We'll take away their pearly things.

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