New Play in Manhattan

The Morning Star (by Emlyn Williams; produced by Guthrie McClintic) augurs well: it provides a talented playwright with a timely theme. But in spite of a smooth production topped by deft, middle-aged English Actress Gladys Cooper, it works out badly: the author of The Corn is Green won't respect his material, can't resist shooting the works. Dealing with an upper middle-class London household during the blitz, The Morning Star is so rammed with happenings--deaths, births, accidents, war news, medical discoveries, rooms to let, illicit love affairs--that after a while the play's title seems less like a symbol of hope than the name of a newspaper. Too often, moreover, the war news is shunted off the front page in favor of flashier items. The hero (Gregory Peck), a brilliant young doctor thwarted by his superiors, abandons his work to toss off a best-selling novel, and his wife to take up vith a high-stepping trollop (Wendy Barrie). But medicine and matrimony eventually win out.

The whole thing is too gaudy, but what spoils it even as theater is that it's for the most part too shopworn. The bright comedy moments and briefly vivid scenes are swallowed up in the pat speeches, dime-a-dozen situations, stagey gestures, footlight heroics. Playwright Williams has let his memories of a hundred bad plays blot out lis memories of the war.

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