New Plays in Manhattan

Antony and Cleopatra (adapted by Professor William Strunk Jr. from William Shakespeare; produced by Laurence Rivers, Inc.). Last summer 35-year-old Actress Tallulah Bankhead, Alabama-born daughter of Speaker William Brockman Bankhead of the House of Representatives, married Actor John Emery and announced that she was "going to New York to raise hell." Nobody imagined, however, that Shakespeare was to be included in the party. But last week, after long preparation and a road tour, Tallulah swept into Manhattan's Mansfield Theatre in the traditional gilded brassiere and diaphanous pantalettes of the serpent of the Nile. After watching veteran Conway Tearle play Antony like a bemused warhorse, with a Cleopatra who was more like a flouncing Cleopatsy, Broadway was not surprised when the play closed after five performances.

Spade-calling (TiME, Aug. 22, 1932), bronze-haired Tallulah Bankhead, famed for her heavy-lidded sophistication, has been in the theatre since she was 16. Longest Bankhead run on a Broadway stage was Reflected Glory (1936), 127 performances. Shortest: (see above.)

Julius Caesar (by William Shakespeare; produced by the Mercury Theatre). Manhattan's intimate Comedy Theatre once echoed to Holbrook Blinn's The Bad Man, staged Katharine Cornell's debut (1916), played host to the theatre's great until northbound Broadway moved on and left it to amateurs, foreign language mummers. Last week Orson Welles and John Houseman reclaimed it as the Mercury Theatre, and the change meant more than a new sign over the marquee. It meant a new. vitalizing experiment in drama.

No gilded trappings hung from above, no canvas masonry affronted the eye of the 1937 realist. The play, up-to-date in dress and interpretation, was the thing. The red-brick back wall was the only backdrop, the gadgets of a more formal theatre hung idle in the wings. The high loft, emptied of its scenery, lent itself to a grotesque play of light and shadow. Below, on a bare stage platform graded down toward the audience by three steps, the Mercury Theatre players enacted a sinister tragedy of dictatorship.

Up-angled shafts of light marked this Caesar (Joseph Holland) well--his striding height, jutting chin, cross-belted military tunic, sleek modern breeches. Dark-shirted followers saluted him with uplifted right arms, sharp hails. Lights more benign singled out contemplative, poet-haired Brutus (Orson Welles), a reluctant, calmly-reasoning conspirator--an introspective idealist in a blue serge suit. No lean and hungry Cassius was Actor Martin Gabel, but a hunched, spleeny agitator, surrounded by grim adherents in modern mufti, slouch hats pluck'd about their ears.

It was the hand of Shakespeare, but the voice of someone more like Leftist Playwright Clifford Odets. Manhattan play-goers took the play's smooth unmetered flow, its indubitable 1937 flavor, with mingled delight and disbelief. The delight was for a first-rate show that, played straight ahead with no break, kept them on the edges of their seats for an hour and forty minutes. The disbelief arose from the snobbish, traditional feeling that Shakespeare must be dressed up fit to kill, cannot possibly be made presentable on the bare boards he wrote for.

Chief credit for this Julius Caesar went to its incredibly young (22-year-old) actor-director, Orson Welles. He sheared the play of pomp and philippics, put the accent on pace, scuffling mobs, expanded the brief episode of Cinna, the poet, into a minor tragedy. Lighting sets the mood and changes the scene. Notable effects: the giant backwall shadow of Antony, speaking over Caesar's body; a cross-hatching of light and shadow high up in the loft, unintentionally giving the impression of crossed fasces: the climax, patterned after LIFE's pictures of last summer's Nazi Congress at Nuernberg, vertical shafts of light stabbing up through the darkness as background for the eulogy to the noblest Roman of them all.

Many first-nighters thought Orson Welles, who spent a month directing, two days rehearsing, the noblest Shakespearean of them all. Where England's Maurice Evans conjured up Richard II as a conceivable character from history, Welles made Brutus a living liberal. Thespian Welles at 19 was Tybalt in Katharine Cornell's revival of Romeo and Juliet, in the last few months his voice has been radio's "Shadow." He and John Houseman (Four Saints in Three Acts, Panic) joined the Federal Theatre last year, produced a voodoo Macbeth with a Negro cast, Dr. Faustus, Horse Eats Hat. When WPA red tape prohibited their presentation of Marc Blitzstein's steel strike play, The Cradle Will Rock, at the time of the Little Steel Strike (TIME, May 24, et seq.), they deserted the Federal Theatre, staged a fugitive performance. Out of this fugitive movement grew the Mercury Theatre group.

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