New Play in Manhattan

State of the Union (by Howard Lindsay & Russel Grouse; produced by Leland Hay ward) is a very amusing comedy about fairly serious matters. Playwrights Lindsay & Grouse, authors of Life With Father, have vaulted from Father Day to Uncle Sam, from family crotchets to political criticism. With the war ended and self-interest back at the old stand, Lindsay & Grouse are pleading for national unity. But they are shrewd enough to woo their audiences with laughter rather than weary them with lecturing.

The story concerns Grant Matthews (Ralph Bellamy), a world-minded, straight-shooting airplane manufacturer who would like to be President in 1948. The Republican bosses think he might be a likely nominee, a candidate who speaks out--provided he never speaks out of turn. But while they are inoculating him with caution shots, his wife (Ruth Hussey) keeps jabbing him with courage. In the end, Grant walks out on the party bosses.

With lively, witty gags for ammunition, State of the Union shoots at a good many targets--narrow nationalism, diehards, politicos of both parties, Labor's internal squabbles, power politics and smoke-filled rooms, a lazy electorate. But it has its fun with its upstanding hero too. Grant Matthews has ego as well as earnestness; he wobbles as well as walks chalk. Involved with a lady newspaper publisher, he has to hurry back, as a prospective candidate, to the wife who still loves him. Cleverer and stronger-minded than he is, Mary Matthews, like Maggie Shand in Barrie's What Every Woman Knows, does for her husband what he fancies he is doing for himself. State of the Union is almost as much marital comedy as political comment.

It is also more show than play: brisk, broadly human, smartly carpentered, sometimes knowingly corny. And its banner cast brings out all its showmanship.

This week Howard Lindsay and Russel McKinley ("Buck") Grouse were gilt-edging the gag that once dubbed them "the most successful collaborators since the Smith Brothers." They had written the biggest smash, thus far, of the season.* They had, unprecedentedly in Broadway history, two current hits that had opened six years apart, /- And with eleven years of co-authoring, co-adapting, co-producing behind them, they had seven successes to their credit against one lone flop (Strip for Action).

The enormously flourishing state of their union reflects teamwork as much as it does talent. Lindsay & Grouse shrewdly understand the artistic limits of collaboration. Two men, Lindsay once remarked, may write a great show--only one man can write a great play. They are never selfconscious. When need be, they are brutally frank with each other.

Double Take. Alike in talent, they are poles apart in temperament. Prankish, pun-loving Grouse is easygoing, Lindsay something of a hypochondriac. Warns Grouse: "Don't ever ask Howard how he feels, because he'll tell you." Lindsay likes a drink; Grouse swore off "in the middle of a beer" nearly 30 years ago. Lindsay loves the country; Grouse loathes it. Lindsay is as nattily dressed as a floorwalker, Grouse as rumpled as an insomniac's bed. Lindsay is too scared of first nights to go, Grouse too curious to stay away.

Their backgrounds differ also. New York State-born Lindsay, 56, has been close to the footlights since he gave public recitations as a child, of such ditties as When You See a Man in Woe, Walk Right Up and Say Hello. Carrying a spear, working in tent shows, Shakespeare, burlesque, he found his feet in the '20s as a director (Dulcy, Gay Divorce), founded his fortune in the '30s as a playwright (She Loves Me Not). Eighteen years ago he married delicate, blond Dorothy Stickney (the original Mother in Life With Father), whom a wag once described as a "butterfly with teeth."

Ohio-born Buck Grouse, 52, hopped at 17 from high school to cub reporting, eventually became a columnist on the New York Evening Post, an author of nostalgic Americana (Mr. Currier and Mr. Ives, It Seems like Yesterday). He swung over to Broadway as pressagent for the Theatre Guild. Bawled out for not getting enough publicity for Maxwell Anderson's Valley Forge, he retorted that he'd managed to get George Washington's picture on 2-c- stamps.

The two men first teamed up, not to write but to rewrite a new book for Anything Goes, which subsequently became an Ethel Merman smash hit. After two more musicomedy successes, they pined for words without music, set about dramatizing Life With Father. The script aroused so little enthusiasm that Alfred Lunt, Roland Young, Walter Huston all turned down the title role. Lindsay himself finally took the part.

Fee for Two. Having authored the show with the second longest run (to date) in Broadway history, Lindsay & Grouse next produced the show with the fourth longest run: Arsenic and Old Lace. From these two projects alone, each has made roughly a million--with plenty of gold still to be mined. The two men don't like to talk finances, claim that most of their earnings just slip away. When a columnist wrote that Lindsay's money had "gone to his head," Lindsay phoned him, said "Thanks, I've been wondering where it went."

On at least one thing besides the theater their minds meet. Along with Marc Connelly, Arthur Kober and F.P.A., both are passionate regulars in that famed weekly gathering of cutthroat bonhomie that first achieved fame as the Thanatopsis Literary and Inside Straight Club. This poker game, which Heywood Broun once asked to be kept going till 10 a.m., "so I can make my picket line," and which has been known to run for 33 hours,* is for Grouse "the most refreshing mental bath I can get." The club has a West Coast "branch," and "with luck and a plane," say Lindsay & Grouse, "we can make both games the same week."

*Other name playwrights have not made much news. You Touched Me!, by The Glass Menagerie's Tennessee Williams, is just a mild draw; The Next Half Hour, by Harvey's Mary Chase, did a fast fold. So did Irwin Shaw's The Assassin. Robert E. Sherwood's The Rugged Path (TiME, Nov. 19) can largely thank its star, Spencer Tracy, for so far being a box-office hit; it was panned as a play.

/- Life With Father now bills itself: "Established 1939."

* For news of another persistent poker game, see PRESS.

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