New Plays in Manhattan

The Searching Wind (by Lillian Hellman; produced by Herman Shumlin) gave Broadway its first really provocative drama of the season. Unlike Playwright Hellman's The Children's Hour, The Little Foxes, Watch on the Rhine, her The Searching Wind is not predominantly taut, violent, intense. Its span is long and its world spacious, though the action itself is too crowded at times. Playwright Hellman has pitched a handful of lives into the swirling history of our age. Her ominous little Washington dinner party of today not only resolves a puzzling 22-year-old triangle story; it audits the conduct of an irresolute career diplomat, his retired liberal of a father-in-law, his bored wife who broke bread with fascist-minded bigwigs.

From Washington the play flashes back to Rome the day Mussolini marched in, to Berlin when Naziism still wore swaddling clothes, to Paris on the eve of the Munich pact. It shows the young diplomat Alex Hazen (Dennis King) marrying not the serious-minded girl he loves (Barbara O'Neil) but her more conventional best friend (Cornelia Otis Skinner). The women become estranged; later the other woman becomes Alex's mistress. But not till the reunion in Washington is the true nature of their roles brought to light: it was less their feeling for Alex that actuated the women than their desire to hurt each other.

At first hand, all this time, Alex watches Fascism become real, become bold, become imperious. A decent man, he is dismayed by what he sees; a muddled man, he hangs onto the hope that somehow good will come of evil; a man whose stake is in the status quo, he instinctively makes out a case for appeasement. No figure of real power himself, Alex yet remains the spokesman for the official blunders, delays, defections that made Munich no terminus but merely the last stop before Armageddon.

Alex's mistake, his caustic father-in-law (finely played by Dudley Digges) tells him, lay in his subscribing to the notion "that bad men are stupid and good men are smart." But the scornful old liberal, who knew better, himself behaved worse. He cynically abandoned his fighting newspaper, sat snorting in the shade.

An arraignment, The Searching Wind is also a plea. The final fiery curtain goes to Alex's crippled son (beautifully played by Montgomery Clift). With the full truth spread out for the first time before him, he cries shame upon the parents he loves, demands passionately that there be no more "fancy fooling around," no such mistakes--for any reason--again.

The play's great merit is its genuine bite; its worst weakness, that it bites off more than it can chew. It is more like two plays--and two very unequal ones. When it seizes its theme and blows across the blackened grass of the age, The Searching Wind is bracing and sharp--a drama of adult talk and challenging ideas. But the theme both hampers the plot and holds aloof from it. The love story lacks fullness. The women lack freedom. They live only in hurried, gasping moments of crisis--and in an atmosphere too often dominated by proclamations, rioting and the boom of guns.

--But Not Goodbye (by George Seaton; produced by John Golden) tries to perk up a tale of mousy living people by introducing some lively dead ones. The spirits are a just-dead, good-natured New England paterfamilias (Harry Carey) and his long-dead, thick-brogued, high cockalorum of a father (J. Pat O'Malley). They scuttle, garrulous and unobserved, about the parlor watching the effect of death on the household, bemoaning their earthly shortcomings, trying by spectral ruses to straighten out the mess in which the dead man left his affairs.

A harmless little comedy larded with bits of homey philosophy and sad-eyed sentiment, But Not Goodbye merits no worse charges than that most of it is dated and much of it is dull.

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