New Play in Manhattan

Case of Clyde Griffiths (by Erwin Piscator & Lena Goldschmidt; Group Theatre & Milton Shubert, producers). Thirty years ago an errant youth of Cortland, N.Y. named Chester Gillette took his sweetheart, Grace Brown, out in a rowboat, drowned her because Grace was pregnant and Chester wanted to marry a rich girl. For a generation Chester Gillette's crime and punishment were forgotten by the outside world until Theodore Dreiser exhumed the case, wrote a wordy but exhaustive novel about it called An American Tragedy. Since 1926 the Dreiser story of "Clyde Griffiths' " downfall has become a sort of national institution.

Hardly a summer goes by now without some impatient young criminal providing the Press with an "American Tragedy Murder." Paramount filmed the story in 1931, subsequently defending itself against one suit brought by Mr. Dreiser because the company had "vivisected" his work, another brought by Grace Brown's mother, who claimed she had been libeled. A U.S. playwright made a melodrama out of the story. A pair of French playwrights made it a character study. A Russian playwright made it a text for Bolshevism. But no adapters have departed so radically from the novel or achieved so exciting a result as the German authors of Case of Clyde Griffiths.

Erwin Piscator is best known as the onetime head of Berlin's great Volksbuehne (People's Theatre), which boasted the incredible total of 250,000 subscribers. A Communist, Piscator fled Germany when the Nazis took over, now carries on his broad theatrical experimentation in the U.S.S.R. Case of Clyde Griffiths bears the Piscator stamp, offers U. S. theatregoers for the first time a comprehensive idea of an entirely new set of values he is trying to bring to the stage.

Play begins with a Speaker (cello-voiced Morris Carnovsky) appearing in the orchestra pit. In logical, compassionate language he explains that this story is going to be concerned with a young boy who is caught and destroyed between the mill wheels of the upper and lower classes, with neither of which does he succeed in identifying himself. Here is the boy (a light finds the face of Clyde on the dark stage). Here is one girl (a light finds Roberta). Here is another (out of the darkness springs the face of Sondra). Both are equally young, equally beautiful. But Sondra is rich, while Roberta is a poor factory girl. The story begins to unfold on the one articulated set 'at an accelerating pace. Now feeling as if he were in a nightmare, now as if he were in a lecture hall, the spectator watches Clyde's progress through his uncle's collar factory, his break with the workers in the drying room, his seduction of Roberta, his bashful meeting with Sondra, his wild joy when Sondra proposes to him, his wild despair when Roberta tells him she is going to have a baby. In a final burst of speed, the drama skips the actual murder, winds up with a half-symbolic, half-realistic trial scene, which concludes with the voices of the jury sending Clyde to the electric chair.

"He dies as a sacrifice to his rebellious, yearning heart, and he will be forgiven," cries Clyde's mother.

"He dies as a sacrifice to Society," snaps the Speaker. "And that will not be forgiven !"

Some critics left the premiere growling that Clyde (played by Alexander Kirkland) was a cad, that no matter how far back one probed to fix the blame for his fate, there was no excuse for indicting Society. Meanwhile, the theatre was resounding with jubilant whistles and applause not only from radical Group Theatre sympathizers but from many a nonpartisan theatregoer who had just been given a mighty exhibition of theatrical illusion.

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