New Play in Manhattan

Harriet (by Florence Ryerson & Colin Clements; produced by Gilbert Miller) brings history and Helen Hayes (Caesar and Cleopatra, Mary of Scotland, Victoria Regina) together again. The story of Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811-96), from her marriage at 25 till the middle of the Civil War, Harriet is anything but a militant play, is only by fits & starts a serious one. It is more concerned with crinolines than crusaders. Perhaps it had to be. For while Harriet Beecher Stowe was lifted to the heights with Uncle Tom's Cabin, during most of her life she was bogged down in family affairs.

But the play does not even do justice to her extraordinary obsessing family. There was her father, old Lyman Beecher, bellowing salvation from his pulpit. There was her brother Henry Ward, heaving fashionable bricks from his. There were six other preacher brothers, a whalebone-and-woman's rights sister Catherine, an empty-pursed absent-minded professor of a husband, a batch of noisy kids. Uncle Tom, according to the play, got written with the house all Topsy-turvy. In the midst of Harriet's fame, cooks fired up and gave notice, a son got wounded in the war his mother helped create, twin daughters set their hearts on the same young man and a third daughter won him.

The lighter side of Harriet is sometimes lifelike, sometimes merely Life With Fatherlike. Its serious moments--the capture of a fugitive slave in the Stowe parlor; Harriet delivering a big, meant-to-be-timely speech--are poorly contrived, patly inserted. But Actress Hayes, acting with her usual skill, aging with her usual art, creates, if not a great and rounded woman, a bustling housewife who is also sore beset.

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