New Play in Manhattan

Tomorrow the World (by James Gow & Arnaud d'Usseau; produced by Theron Bamberger) turns an appalling postwar problem into interesting theater. Foreseeing the day when 12,000,000 Nazi-bred children will have to be humanized, it does an advance test-tube job on one of them. Son of an American mother who died when he was a baby, and of a German liberal killed off in a concentration camp, twelve-year-old Emil Bruckner comes -- somewhat inexplicably in wartime -- to live with relatives in the U.S.

Arrogant, deceitful, a complete little Nazi, Emil flaunts his swastika, spits on the U.S., spies for the Fuehrer, tries a divide-&-conquer technique on the house hold, plots to break up his uncle's marriage to a Jewish schoolteacher. When he almost murders his little cousin, his patient elders are ready to give up. But they ask themselves what chance there is of rehabilitating 12,000,000 kids if they can not cope with one. They do a good deal of ferreting into Emil's youthfully warped nature. Emil himself, as the curtain falls, shows signs of changing.

A melodrama with a message, Tomorrow the World provokes thought while providing thrills. And its skillful acting --particularly by radio's astonishing twelve-year-old Skippy (George Vincent) Homeier as Emil -- makes it passingly plausi ble. But it is ultimately unsatisfying --too unevenly written, too sensationally worked out. With the theater's need for hurry, it makes Emil's rehabilitation seem more a race against time than a question of time.

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