New Plays in Manhattan

Another Sun (by Dorothy Thompson & Fritz Kortner; produced by Cheryl Crawford). When Dorothy Thompson attacks Naziism in her famed column On the Record, she is one of the deadliest haters now writing. But when, last week, she attacked it in her first play, she seemed tame as tea and weak as water. A dull, dawdling tale of refugee theatre folk in Manhattan at the time of Anschluss (Co-Playwright Kortner is himself a refugee actor). Another Sun told of their hopes & fears and of the dilemma of the most famous of them, who, unable to get work in the U. S., is tempted to seize the olive branch held out to him by the Reich.

The play has almost no plot, hence almost no suspense; it is largely a sentimental picture of mixed-up people in a strange land. What little emotion it arouses is one of pity for the refugees' plight rather than of indignation for what caused it. This is to write in a minor key, and flub a big theme. For there must always be those who, sick for home, stand in tears amid the alien corn. But only once in a very long while has the home they weep for been turned into a living Hell.

Night Music (by Clifford Odets; produced by The Group Theatre). Clifford Odets, of all people, has suddenly decided that life's a pretty swell thing. He used to be grimly up on the barricades; in Night Music he gaily rides a carrousel. He used to pump lead into Old Glory; in Night Music he almost gets round to waving her. His tortured characters used to writhe--extremely vocally--in their separate hells; in Night Music, Boy Meets Girl and ends up clasping her in his arms.

But if Night Music, with its lightly humorous and sentimental tour of Manhattan, spells danger for the stabbing, rebellious talent that made history on Broadway, it reveals, all the same, that the talent still exists. No two plays in one season could superficially have more in common than Odets' Night Music and Elmer Rice's Manhattan idyl, Two on an Island. But where Rice, turned slickster, wears false face and speaks in falsetto, Odets still talks like Odets, can still be ardent, can still make a line ring out like a pistol shot, or a phrase cut like a knife to the bone. There are genuinely vivid and pulsing scenes in Night Music; and at least the hero (admirably played by Elia Kazan) is thoroughly alive.

But the play shows everywhere a slackened rein. It lacks entrails, it lacks sense of direction, it offers no weightier message than that Heaven Helps Those Who Help Themselves. Instead of the greasy, indignant, impoverished out-of-jointers who formerly served Odets as a kind of Nick-the-Greek chorus, Night Music offers a benevolent detective, half Mr. Fixit, half Dutch uncle, who chants to the lovers of the Land of Opportunity. And not one of Odets' three dozen characters cuts in with a Sez You.

It's all so kindly and sanguine that the Broadway critics who earlier this season gushed over Saroyan's boozy, happy-go-lucky The Time of Your Life last week bawled Odets out for turning Night Music into the same kind of Saroyanesque carnival. Mr. Odets may well find this change of tune a little confusing. But while basking in his brave new world he may also find it worth thinking about that he, who in the past was always being compared to Chekhov, is now being compared to Saroyan.

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