New Play in Manhattan

Soldier's Wife (by Rose Franken; produced by William Brown Meloney). Firing the season's first salute to the matinee trade, the author of Claudia will probably bag something of another Claudience. Despite its title, Soldier's Wife is not at all a problem drama, not much more of a war play; after bringing John Rogers home from the Pacific to his Katherine's waiting and war-toughened arms, it scuttles the theme of marital readjustment and vaults into passably aimed comedy and thoroughly aimless storytelling. After Katherine's letters to John overseas are published and prosper, a cynical interviewer and a suave lady editor take Katherine in hand and give her a whirl. At the end she slams the door on fame and draws up a chair to the fireside.

A sometimes light, sometimes languid, always empty play, Soldier's Wife should make the grade on its helpful acting (Martha Scott, Myron McCormick, Glenn Anders), its spurts of amusing chatter, and a certain women's-magazine astuteness. Playwright Franken, for whom opportunism knocks once a season, knows how to dangle sophistication before the eyes of domesticity without blinding them. She knows how to paint tiny clouds on the horizon that never lead to rain. Above all, she knows how to make lively copy of the commonplaces of home life--the new slipcovers, the babies' bottles, the bargain dresses, the darned socks, the husbands who never notice what their wives are wearing.

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