New Plays in Manhattan

The Late George Apley (adapted from John P. Marquand's novel by the author and George S. Kaufman; produced by Max Gordon) neatly blends not-too-broad laughs with Beacon Street atmosphere. A pleasant footlighting of Marquand's famous satire, it will doubtless detain its thin-blooded Brahmin hero (Leo G. Carroll) on barbarian Broadway for a shockingly long time. And if the stage Apley is portrayed a little more in the rough than in the round, he never--thanks to the fine perceptiveness and wonderful finish of Actor Carroll's performance--turns into outright caricature.

Laid in 1912, the play (unlike the book) introduces its hero in middle age, when the mold has hardened and the mold has begun to collect. To tradition-reflexed George Apley, Boston is Western Civilization, Emerson the Bible, Mount Auburn cemetery the carriage entrance to Heaven, and the strenuous life a round of bird walks, committee meetings and the best clubs. Sex, Apley gathers from a reading of Freud, "very largely governs the lives of the people ... in other parts of the country." Even in Boston, to Apley's dismay, its lure involves his son and daughter, as once long ago Apley himself had been passionately involved with a South Boston colleen.

It is through having to exclude the long-ago, the whole gradual development of Apley from a human bus into a human tram, that the play falls short of the book--in irony, humanity, completeness. But greatly enlivening the plotless story and largely static portraiture are a continuing comedy of Back Bay manners, the incidental commotion of Cousin Hattie's tombstone and the best of the rather too recurrent laughs about Harvard or New York. Despite the laughs, the Apleys in the play show traces of New York blood in their veins--just enough, while slightly clouding the tone, to quicken the tempo.

The Streets Are Guarded (by Laurence Stallings; produced by John C. Wilson). Twenty years ago Playwright Stallings co-authored the tough, lusty What Price Glory?, the best American play about World War I. The Streets Are Guarded, a play about World War II, tells a fuzzy story about a heroic marine who pulls off a perilous sortie against the Japs. With a fever-ridden fanatically religious pharmacist's mate acting as Greek chorus, it seems throughout to symbolize a modern miracle. But what it says at the end is that such "miracles" are the everyday stuff of soldiering.

Telling no full-sized story, The Streets Are Guarded mixes vaporish mysticism with barrack-room horseplay and talk that lacks the old punch. Over it all lies the war-at-a-distance wistfulness of a man who once lived war at first hand. Meant for a martial chant, it is more like a nostalgic ballad, too often sung rustily and off key.

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