New Play in Manhattan

The Rugged Path (by Robert E. Sherwood; produced by The Playwrights' Company) represents Robert Sherwood's first playwriting in five years and Spencer Tracy's first Broadway play acting in 15. Something so newsworthy should add up to something more notable.

Playwright Sherwood is writing about the last five years in terms of Morey Vinion, the "liberal" editor of his brother-in-law's "conservative" paper. After the Nazi invasion, Morey conies out for aid to Russia and collides head-on with the paper's Red-baiting, policymaking, Mammon-serving, isolationist business manager. He chucks his job, joins the Navy, becomes the cook on a destroyer.

The destroyer is sunk in the Pacific, but Morey reaches an island held by a small U.S. and native guerrilla group. He has a chance to be sent home on a submarine; but having found new faith in the rugged decency of simple men, he begs to stay on and fight by their side. By their side he dies fighting.

The Rugged Path, in its materials, is a kind of odyssey of the war years; in its intellectual content, a kind of leafing through the liberal testament ; in its credo, an affirmation of average human decency.

And much more immediately, of course, it is the story of Morey Vinion. All this is a good deal for one play. That is probably why it gives the effect of two or three plays. It is panoramic but unfocused.

It has an elaborate itinerary but only the vaguest destination. Its hero is some times protagonist, sometimes symbol, sometimes Robert E. Sherwood, but -- in spite of Actor Tracy's very natural, likable, occasionally vigorous performance--never quite a flesh-&-blood human being. One trouble with The Rugged Path is that it is not dynamic enough to avoid seeming emotionally dated. Another trouble is that Playwright Sherwood never really comes to grips with the liberal's precise role in the present world. He would have had a harder hitting play if, instead of leafing through the whole testament, he had concentrated on one good text. There is scattered good talk, fitful eloquence, passingly sharp incident, in The Rugged Path--but the play as a whole is a tangled Sherwood Forest of ideas.

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