New Plays In Manhattan

One-Man Show (by Ruth Goodman and Augustus Goetz; produced by Jed Harris) concerns a middle-aged widower and his daughter (Frank Conroy & Constance Cummings) who run an art gallery. Attractive and sought after, the girl is indifferent to other men because she is pathologically attached to her father. The father tries to cut the cord between them; the girl holds tight.

Then, suddenly, she falls very much in love with a new suitor--and One-Man Show drops from its sleeve the card whose edge had, for some time back, been just discernible to the lynx-eyed. It was the father who, deliberately or not, had fostered the girl's fixation; it is the father who tries now to preserve it.

A clever play, with some pointed dialogue and a sophisticated art-gallery air, One-Man Show is spurious drama. It puts slickness ahead of seriousness, sacrifices the characters to the plot. But Jed Harris's shrewd direction--as has often happened in the past two decades--makes the play seem better than it is. sb sb sb

As the Boy Wonder of the 1920s, lantern-jawed, shiny-haired Jed Harris (now 45) chalked up a record which probably no Broadway producer has equaled since: four successive smash hits (Broadway, Coquette, The Royal Family, The Front Page) in less than two years. At the age of 28 he had (counting road companies) seven productions on the boards at once, and an income of $40,000 a week.

In return he gave to show business a drive and mettlesomeness (as both producer and director) that acted like ozone, even if at times they were only shots of dope. In addition to being good shows, Broadway and The Front Page set a trend in colorful, hard-hitting entertainment; they caught the garish, profane, melodramatic spirit of an era.

As the era ended-- in September 1929-- Harris "retired." But this characteristic Harris gesture fooled nobody; after a trip abroad and a tumble in Wall Street he was once more aswirl with ideas. The next few years brought more kudos than cash--and the kudos more for revivals (Uncle Vanya, The Inspector General, A Doll's House} than for exciting new productions.

But an exciting new one came in 1938; Thornton Wilder's Our Town.

Student and Stowaway. A meteoric manager, Harris (real name: Jacob Horowitz) is a volcanic man. Born in Newark (though he later said he was born in Vienna), he read omnivorously at Yale for two years, then quit. He bummed his way west and then abroad, coming home a stowaway in a tramp steamer. Home now meant Broadway. Harris became a press agent for the Shuberts and "stamped and cried with rage" at the way his bosses butchered scripts. When he had saved up $3,000 he started producing on his own.

At the height of his success, Harris disparaged it by quoting Critic Percy Hammond's dictum that "the theater is the shell game of the arts." But self-disparagement is not his outstanding trait.

On a Broadway where egos come extra large, Harris is still notably outsized. Once Harris tried to get Otto Kahn to back a production of O'Neill's one-act plays.

When Kahn replied that he did not think the idea timely, Harris flung out: "I asked for your money, not your advice." Despite his bellows and bravura, no body has ever denied Harris' charm when he wants to display it, or his unfailing vigor in the theater. Remarked one friend : "Jed will quarrel with you, he will embarrass you, he will break your heart, he will drive you crazy -- but he will al ways be good for the show."

Hope for the Best (by William Mc-Cleery; produced by Jean Dalrymple & Marc Connelly) casts Franchot Tone --absent from Broadway since 1940 -- as a famous columnist. He has 11,000,000 readers lapping up his harmless froth, but what he yearns after is to feed them politics and liberalize their thinking. Scared out of trying by his highbrow, reactionary fiancee, he finally borrows enough gumption from a sympathetic young girl (Jane Wyatt)-- incidentally swapping fiancees while crossing his Rubicon.

Hope for the Best is a pretty arid comedy. Almost void of plot, it vainly falls back on its second line of defense-- its bloodless, undramatic characters; then on its third line-- its ideas and talk. The ideas, involving democracy now and to come, are sound but superimposed. The talk, though sometimes diverting and sometimes sharp, is eventually just engulfing.

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