New Plays in Manhattan

Harvey (by Mary Coyle Chase; produced by Brock Pemberton) is the funniest and most likable fantasy that Broadway has seen in years. Described in one sentence, this yarn about a balmy tosspot who knows an imaginary outsized rabbit named Harvey may suggest all the horrors of relentless whimsy. Distributed over three acts, Elwood P. Dowd and the hare of the dog that bit him become a delightful adventure in wackiness.

The thing is partly delightful because Playwright Chase (a former Denver newspaperwoman whom Dorothy Parker once called "the greatest undiscovered wit in the country") has written some immensely funny lines, and in Elwood has created a very special character--droll, daffy, warmhearted, touching. It is also partly delightful because Elwood, who on a stage could easily become incredible or dismaying, is played to perfection by veteran Vaudevillian Frank Fay (as is Elwood's harassed sister by Josephine Hull). Fay not only makes Elwood a fine fellow when he is riding high; he makes him an even finer one when, in a tricky scene where mood is everything, he quietly talks to a psychiatrist about himself and Harvey, and sometimes doesn't talk--only sits and stares.

The play's faults--an overextended first act, an undernourished last one, some rubbishy minor characters, some razzle-dazzle farce--are pretty well buried underneath its fun. Underneath it, too, lies the hint given by many humorists that wackiness may be the last word in wisdom. Harvey, says Elwood, is greater than Einstein--Einstein did away with time & space, but Harvey does away with time, space--and objections.

In Harvey 47-year-old Frank Fay is playing his first straight Broadway role since he was a kid. As he sees it, he is playing entirely against himself: "There isn't a single Fay line in the whole part." But the performer with the large, tired face and the vague blue eyes is at least as distinctive as Elwood--and perhaps as quirky.

One of the great vaudevillians and conceivably the greatest master of ceremonies of his day, Fay shows not a trace of breeziness, brassiness or smut. His manner is almost prim, his delivery slow, his material largely pointless. For one drawled gag like "Had a date with a newspaperwoman the other night--yes, she keeps a stand," there are a dozen droll nothings that are triumphs of timing and intonation.

Fay is a quiet, moody, self-conscious man whose wit is armor as well as ammunition. He is crotchety about his age; to somebody who asked where he was born, and when, he quipped: "I was born in San Francisco--and I don't blame you for trying." He is facetious about his youth:

"Mother made me stay 16 years old until I could lick a cop." He is elusive about his circumstances: "Am I well off? Don't you know about fellows who are 'well off'--jumping out of windows, hitting against one another on the way down?" He doesn't drink, "but I remember how it tastes." He telescopes his vaudeville success into: "Take Akron. They wouldn't let me open there. Later they couldn't afford to pay me." He boils down his radio career to: "A man paid me and I went home." He sums up a London that adored him and dubbed him the Wistful One with "Some people are knighted and that's the title I got." Of his former wife, Cinemactress Barbara Stanwyck, he says nothing at all.

Embezzled Heaven (adapted by L. Bush-Fekete and Mary Helen Fay from Franz Werfel's novel; produced by the Theater Guild) describes the struggles of a pious Moravian servant, Teta (Ethel Barrymore), to clinch her salvation. Her best hope, she decides, is to use her savings to make a priest of her nephew. When, years later, the nephew is revealed as no priest at all but a rascally mountebank, Teta feels sure she is damned. But at the Vatican, where she goes on a pilgrimage, the Holy Father reassures her: though she has erred in trying to buy her way into Heaven, by her love and faith she has earned her way there.

Though agreeable enough at times, Embezzled Heaven is dramatically too thin and atmospherically too thick. Nor is Teta herself a very human figure. She remains interesting only because Actress Barrymore, though too much a great lady for the part, cannot possibly be dull.

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