New Play in Manhattan

Time and the Conways (by J. B.

Priestley; produced by Crosby Gaige). Author John Boynton Priestley is a blunt Yorkshireman who has written several popular books, of late years has turned to playwriting. Three of his plays are currently on the London stage. Last week one of them,*another attempt to dramatize that old riddle, time, failed to impress Manhattan audiences either as drama or as metaphysics. Time and the Conways was like a heavy slab of Yorkshire pudding with no roast beef.

Novelist Priestley has said that "the audience will accept almost anything during the first act." What he makes them accept in Time and the Conways' first act is a boring family party. The Conways are celebrating Daughter Kay's (Jessica Tandy) 21st birthday by playing charades and talking big about the future. All of them look forward to successful careers, happy marriages. Suddenly Kay, Cassandra-like, peers into the night and foresees the drab reality.

Act II, 19 years later, shows how right she was. Kay, who wanted to be a novelist, is a journalist and hates it. Robin (Christopher Quest) is a no-account. Madge (Joan Henley), who dreamed of reforming the world, is an embittered schoolteacher. Hazel (Hazel Terry), who wanted a handsome husband with a yacht, has only a husband. Little Carol (Mary Jones), who loved life so passionately, is dead. Mrs. Conway (Dame Sybil Thorndike) is aging gracelessly. And so it goes. Only Alan (Godfrey Kenton) is contented as a shabby clerk because he has a new conception of time. Time, as he sermonizes to Kay, is a series of states which man can see only in succession, but which really exist simultaneously. Therefore, man should accept life as a whole, as a composition of light & shade.

Just in case some of the audience came in late, Act III takes everybody willy-nilly back again to the party in Act I. This time even the dunces in the back row can hear the irony of the Conways' hopes., The audience knows how time will cheat them, already feels a little cheated itself.

-The other two: I Have Been Here Before, People at Sea.

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