New Plays in Manhattan

Mr. Roberts (adapted by Thomas Heggen & Joshua Logan from Mr. Heggen's novel; produced by Leland Hayward) was a smash hit (advance sale: $400,000) weeks before it arrived on Broadway. Cased out of town, it was rumored to be out of this world. Happily, it is one of the better things in it: a good show superlatively produced; a rowdy, romantic, sometimes rather touching, sometimes uproariously funny wartime chronicle.

Laid on a Pacific cargo ship late in the war and far from the fighting, Mr. Roberts pictures a shipload of men worn down by lack of change, lack of women, lack of war. It suggests that boredom can be as tough on the nerves as bombardment. The only war the crew of the AK 601 can fight is against their captain, who makes life tough for others because life was tough for him. The crew's great hero is Lieut, (j.g.) Roberts, a "quiet guy who, while sweating to get transferred to the real fight, keeps in trim scrapping with the skipper. But when the captain refuses the crew a desperately needed shore leave, Mr. Roberts, to get it for them, promises to toe the line. The amazed and disgusted crew thinks that Mr. Roberts has ratted, only to find out the truth and worship him the more.

As a story Mr. Roberts isn't much--and isn't meant to be. It's as a human picture that it triumphs--a human picture in which frustration lives on delightful if not always convincing terms with farce. Tempers get sharper as everything else on the AK 601 gets duller. Denied the simpler masculine pleasures, guys cook up the most elaborate schoolboy pranks; the brinier the life, the earthier the lingo.

Feckless here & there as a show, Mr. Roberts is virtually flawless as a production. Co-Author Logan has directed it brilliantly; everything is timed just right; every character and gesture tells. As Mr. Roberts, Henry Fonda makes his first Broadway performance in eleven years a quietly memorable one. William Harrigan as the captain, David Wayne as a not-too-bright ensign, and above all Robert Keith as a worldly ship's doctor, are in excellent form.

Joshua Lockward Logan was agog with success last week: "Everything's been so wonderful I could choke. It's kind of an endless thing. It is really one of the biggest hits of our lifetime. I've never seen anything like this before in the theater. I practically choked. Why, a man said he'd write me a check for a million dollars for the screen rights. I wanted to accept just so I could see what a check for a million dollars looked like. But we want to do the thing ourselves in Hollywood some day, so we're not selling."

Author Heggen brought his successful short novel to Logan last August, after deciding that he didn't like his own stage version. For three months they hacked away at it together. Says Logan: "Nothing could stop it. It got up on its two feet and walked by itself." More accurately, 6 ft.-1 in., 200-lb. Josh Logan shoved the play into shape.

Director-Co-Author Logan was born 39 years ago "on the paved side of Texarkana." At eight, he saw his first theatrical production--a morality play "full of handmaidens personifying things like Beauty, Youth and Modesty. I think what really got me was seeing Flattery enter through a mirror."

After a spell at Culver Military Academy, he went to Princeton, "so I could be in the Triangle Club." During his first summer vacation from Princeton, he joined a summer stock company that included Margaret Sullavan, James Stewart and Mildred Natwick, and he directed one play. In his senior year, he won a scholarship to the Moscow Art Theater, where he sat for eight months at the feet of the great Stanislavsky.

The Broadway hits Logan has directed include On Borrowed Time, I Married an Angel, Knickerbocker Holiday, Stars in your Eyes, Higher & Higher, Charley's Aunt, By Jupiter.

Since the war (in which he served as an Air Forces intelligence captain), he has directed three more--Annie Get Your Gun, Happy Birthday and John Loves Mary--all still running (next chore: directing Rodgers & Hammerstein's Tales of the South Pacific"). Josh deprecates his chain-explosion of successes: "It's hard to break in, but the moment you've had a success everybody wants you. There just aren't enough directors to go around."

The Old Lady Says "No!" (by Denis Johnston; produced by Richard Aldrich & Richard Myers, in association with Brian Doherty) followed John Bull's Other Island as the Dublin Gate Theater's second Broadway offering. A highly expressionistic fantasy first produced in 1929, it tells of an actor (Micheal MacLiammoir) who is accidentally knocked unconscious while playing Irish Rebel Robert Emmet (1778-1803) in a costume play. The rest of The Old Lady consists of the actor's delirious visions: he is still Emmet, but an Emmet wandering through the streets and pubs and literary gatherings of a decadent modern Dublin.

Plainly The Old Lady is a safire castigating Ireland's fiberless present by contrasting it with her heroic past. But possibly it is also a satire about an Ireland grown languid in the present from living too much in the past--an Ireland in which everyone is so busy acting a part that no one acts. All swift scenes and no sustained story, it flares up brightly one moment, falls flat the next, and its expressionism seems dated as often as daring. But the play has much Celtic freshness of language, and the smoothness born of playing it many times.

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