New Plays in Manhattan

Power Without Glory (by Michael Clayton Hutton; produced by John C. Wilson & the Messrs. Shubert) is a far better thriller after two acts than after three. Though it comes to a thoroughly bad end, it adds up to a fairly good evening. British Playwright Hutton, who has hit on a rather fresh and valid idea for a thriller, may be a bungler of plots, but he is a master of tension. Best of all, a well-knit British cast keeps on acting deftly even after there's little left to act.

In Power Without Glory, a neurotic young man finds that he has just committed a murder. What's more interesting, his respectable working-class family find that they now harbor a murderer. The household sways with all the emotions--incredulity, pity, horror -- born of the event; and with more jagged emotions that the event brings to the surface. And always, beyond the emotions that darken the scene, there is the knowledge that in a few hours, a few minutes, a few seconds, there will come a knock on the door.

Unfortunately, the play suddenly goes to pot as a thriller by trying to be something more than that. The characters start acting noble, the conversation turns rich and strange, the situation slowly drains away. The sad thing is not that the ending lacks punch, but that it altogether lacks point.

Strange Bedfellows (by Florence Ryerson & Colin Clements; produced by Philip A. Waxman) could be called a period suffrage play--or, just as accurately, a sex play, period. It is a mechanically contrived, noisily operated, shamelessly maneuvered piece that achieves all the effect of a bedroom farce without offering even a glimpse of a bed

Laid in San Francisco in 1896, Strange Bedfellows tells what happens when the son (John Archer) of a Senator who is apoplectically opposed to votes for women marries a beautiful and unbudgeable suffragette (Joan Tetzel). The suffragette, finding all the men in her new family just as unbudging, makes converts, and then confederates, of the womenfolk. The wives, remembering Aristophanes' bawdy Lysistrata, stage a sex strike and bolt their doors. The husbands, remembering San Francisco's bordello-lined Barbary Coast, toss off some drinks and bolt the house. After an act of shenanigans, the two parties trade concessions.

Strange Bedfellows is aimed at the exact opposite of that "fit audience . . . though few" to which the poet Milton addressed his work. It will very likely hit the mark. If Playwrights Ryerson & Clements haven't invented a single thing, neither have they missed a single trick: they even remember to wedge the madam of a bordello into a frightfully genteel tea party. And though the authors are never witty, they have an uncanny sense of what will get a laugh; the secret being that it has always gotten one before.

Harvest of Years (by DeWitt Bodeen; produced by Arthur J. Beckhard) is about a farm family named Bromark. It is rather like, if rather worse than, a good many other plays about farm families. Much happens in it, though little seems to. Margareta's man throws her over for her sister Mellie. Chris's girl passes him up for his nephew Jules. People drink; people squabble; babies are born; mothers die in childbirth. But for all that (says the author at the end) the sky doesn't fall in; actually, the family doesn't even fall out.

What's most incredible about Harvest of Years is not what happens, but how dull and derived it's all made to seem. Far from being lit up by any lightning flashes of imagination, the play catches hardly a fresh current of air. In how they think and feel--or how the author thinks they think and feels they feel--the Bromarks are not much more than walking bromides.

The Men We Marry (by Elisabeth Cobb & Herschel Williams; produced by Edgar F. Luckenbach) was quite understandably the work of two people: no one person would be capable of anything so bad. Its brightest witticisms heavier than a bride's first biscuits, it sank out of sight after three performances.

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