New Plays in Manhattan

The Brown Danube (by Burnet Hershey) is the season's fifth anti-fascist fiasco. Like the others it falls short in imagination and scope. Unlike the others, it manages--simply as a florid, stagy melodrama--to keep moving. The story of a noble Austrian family who get in dutch after Anschluss, it tells of a beautiful princess who, to save her brother's life, agrees to marry a brutal Nazi Commissioner, of a sly old grandfather who has the winning card up his sleeve. In the end the harassed nobles get safely across the frontier--into Ruritania.

Life and Death of an American (by George Sklar; produced by the Federal Theatre Project) tells the story of Jerry Dorgan, supposedly the first U. S. baby born in 1900. The play spans the same period and dramatizes many of the same events as The American Way; but Jerry is a worker's son and his story is no paean to the democratic formula. An indignant protest against a system which creates and cannot, cope with poverty and unemployment, it ends bitterly with Jerry killed during a strike.

The early scenes, with their warm, not unhumorous account of a pre-War childhood, and their spanking pace, are fresh and alive. But despite a few touching scenes and a few impassioned ones the play weakens as it proceeds. Jerry never becomes more than a familiar symbol. The plot never slides out of the worn proletarian groove. The stagecraft--combining Living Newspaper technique with class-conscious expressionism--would once have seemed striking, today is dated.

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