New Plays in Manhattan

Spain Laughs (by Joseph S. King; Allied Theatre, producer). Though Spain has rocked with civil war for eight months, until last week the New York stage had seen no drama based upon the conflict. That lack was remedied by the Allied Theatre, a workers' and technicians' semiprofessional acting company.

Apparently having taken a good look at Clifford Odets' high-powered Waiting for Lefty, which first flourished in similar theatrical surroundings, Playwright King has planted his story in proletarian soil behind the Loyalist lines outside Madrid.

Instead of Lefty, Playwright King's characters are waiting for the general of the people's army, who has been captured by Whites and is to be exchanged for the son of a grandee.

Spain Laughs is a series of casually connected scenes occurring in the camp of the Loyalists as they wait for the exchange party to show up. A court-martial condemns to death a captured Rebel and an old man who helped insurgents. A prostitute promises to reform, help the government cause. A man quarrels with his son for joining the milicianos, then volunteers himself. The sergeant greets his rank of recruits as ''Soldiers of Free Spain," shakes each by the hand, calls him ''Comrade!" When the Loyalist general is finally brought back, the treacherous Rebels manage to shoot him anyway. With their leader dead, the milicianos rush to their sandbag wall and laugh in hysterical, heroic rage as they pump bullets over the barricade. Purpose of the first performance of Spain Laughs was to see if a hand-picked audience would give enough encouragement to justify a Broadway opening. The partisan audience gave encouragement in plenty, though its drama-conscious members could not blink the fact that so loose-jointed a show might not be so happy in the commercial theatre as its more compact, economical model.

Arms for Venus (by Randolph Carter; Mary Hone, producer), elaborated from a tale by Petronius, deals with certain aspects of human frailty in the Rome of Emperor Nero's time. This provides Author Carter, who wrote the play while studying for a graduate degree at Harvard, with an opportunity to mix Roman and Christian mythology in such oaths as "I'll be Jove-damned."

The tempers of Manhattan play reviewers are prone to grow shorter in the spring, when the general air of relaxation tempts fledgling producers and first-play authors to emerge hopefully from Broadway's crannies. Last week one critic compared Arms for Venus to a toothache and another mentioned a session in a dentist's chair.

Sun Kissed (by Raymond Van Sickle; Bonfils & Somnes, producers) inauspiciously marks the debut as Broadway producers of Helen G. Bonfils--earnest, stage-struck daughter of the late, blatant publisher of the Denver Post--and her husband, George Somnes. It is a limping comedy about a Los Angeles boardinghouse full of unconvincing and brassily overacted characters, most of them dazedly circling the fringes of Hollywood.

Among the residents of "Newberry Hall," run by an elaborately folksy old gentleman named Humphrey Newberry (Charles Coburn), are a he-man who gives blood donations, a dyspeptic who reads obituary notices, a Kansas City beauty contest winner, a cinemacting goose that earns $15 per day for its owner. Plot complications are ground out when a personable newcomer (Russell Hardie) turns out to be not only a university psychologist but the estranged husband of Newberry's daughter. For humor Sun Kissed draws heavily on the special California attitude toward oranges, climate, Florida, earthquakes.

Storm Over Patsy (by James Bridie; Theatre Guild, producer). Small but perfect in its way, this comedy comes from the German of Bruno Frank by way of the Scotch of Playwright Bridie (A Sleeping Clergyman). Patsy, over whom the storm rages, is a charming mongrel called Colonel in real life. He is about to be executed because his very Irish owner (Sara Allgood of The Plough and the Stars) is unable to pay his long-overdue license fee. This innocent situation causes the town provost's political career to be ruined, for his decision to execute un licensed Patsy arouses the dog-loving electorate, not to hiss, but to bark him out of office. There are also two divorce cases and a love affair attributable to Patsy before the final curtain falls.

To Leo G. Carroll, as a thoroughly bored Scottish magistrate before whom Patsy's case ultimately comes; to Actress Allgood, Patsy's voluble and indignant owner; and to Colonel himself, an amiable, whitish mutt more than glad to give anyone his paw, goes high praise for keeping a theatrical puffball slyly in the air.

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