New Play in Manhattan

Get Away, Old Man (by William Saroyan; produced by George Abbott) sicks one of the most unpredictable of playwrights on one of the screwiest of subjects--Hollywood. When the two collide at their looniest, Get Away, Old Man has some uproarious moments. But Playwright Saroyan's mad visions of Hollywood are curdled by his sour memories: for once, the theater's leading apostle of brotherly love is out to take a poke. His movie producer (Edward Begley) is a nauseous phony, a vicious heel. Saroyan is equally out to take a bow. His genius (Richard Widmark) of a scriptwriter bears a striking resemblance to William Saroyan himself. Noodledom, knavery and narcissism make a troublesome household.

Worse still, Saroyan is a sloppy housekeeper.

The story chiefly concerns the producer's stratagems to get the genius to script a vague but colossal idea about"all the mothers in the world" called Ave Maria.

The genius merely sneers at him, pelts him with insults. But besides playing David to the producer's Goliath, the genius plays Fairy Prince to a fetching young extra, Big Brother to a worshipful messenger boy, and is killed off for just long enough to be mourned and extolled. Then he comes to life again. He was not killed after all.

The Innocent Voyage (adapted by Paul Osborn from Richard Hughes's novel A High Wind in Jamaica; produced by The Theatre Guild) makes a game try at a tough target. Richard Hughes's strikingly original novel is a caution to dramatize. In one sense a fantasy about some 19th-Century children who fell into the hands of pirates and plagued the merry life out of them, it is also a bold study of the seemingly innocent but impenetrable, amoral and frequently shocking nature of children.

Playwright Osborn has coaxed a good deal of the book's oddity and fun into the theater. But from some of its subterraneous horror he shies off, some of it eludes him, and the rest comes through merely as melodrama.

Key character in the story is ten-year-old Emily Thornton (well played by eleven-year-old Abby Bonime), a secretive, imaginative youngster capable--with no villainous intentions--of both coldblooded treachery and hysterical murder.

In the book, the monstrously innocent Emily is terrifying. In the play (because she has to be toned down) she is merely terrified. Similarly all the other children gain in cuteness, lose in acuity, turn physical handsprings instead of moral somersaults. Hence the strange, remote world of the pirate ship does not blend with the stranger, even more remote world of childhood.

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