New Play in Manhattan

Mr. and Mrs. North (by Owen Davis, produced by Alfred de Liagre Jr.) is based on The New Yorker* sketches and a detective novel by the New York Sun's Dramacritic Richard Lockridge and his wife. The Norths (Albert Hackett & Peggy Conklin) are a nice young Greenwich Village couple who have a nice time until Mr. North opens the living-room closet to get the mixings for a drink and a corpse falls out. This rigid, sudden corpse-fall, the best in many dramatic seasons, is executed by a young actor named Robert Lieb who gets no program credit. Thereafter the Norths and their friends are suspected, and an elderly postman who learns something about the crime is whacked to death in the kitchen. Mrs. North is chirpy, lightheaded, dizzily bent on helping the police. Once, when she isn't deliberately trying to, she actually does.

The fantastic farce Arsenic and Old Lace (TIME, Jan. 20) makes murder a paralyzingly funny subject. Mr. and Mrs. North makes it light, amiable, just a little scary.

* Two other plays this season from The New Yorker stories: My Sister Eileen, Pal Joey.

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