New Play in Manhattan

Red Gloves (adapted from the French of Jean-Paul Sartre by Daniel Taradash; produced by Jean Dalrymple) reached Broadway figuratively picketed by the man who wrote it. Sartre had, on hearsay, denounced the U.S. version as a "vulgar, common melodrama with an anti-Communist bias" (TIME, Dec. 6). Though he might justly complain of a translation and a production that (except for Charles Beyer's brilliant acting) are pretty wooden, Red Gloves itself seems pretty typical Sartre.

The setting is a Middle European monarchy during World War II. Most of the play takes place in 1943 when the monarch, feeling that Hitler's goose is cooked, is ready to talk turkey with the Social Democrats and Communists. Hoederer, the Communist leader (Charles Boyer), believes that for tactical reasons the party should join in a coalition. To the party purists this is treason, and they install an idealistic young convert (John Dall) as Hoederer's secretary, with orders to kill him. While the squeamish secretary is funking the assignment, his wife (Joan Tetzel) falls in love with Hoederer and informs on her husband. The husband finally kills Hoederer in a spasm of jealousy.

There is an ironic epilogue two years later when the Russians are about to take over the country. The coalition that the purists once abhorred they now themselves enter. Hoederer has become a party martyr, and his assassin a marked man.

Generally speaking, Red Gloves lacks bias--and takes on a certain breadth--by dealing with political types rather than political tenets, and by suggesting that it takes a good many kinds of people to make up even a Communist world. The essential struggle between idealist and realist, absolutist and compromiser, is indeed common to all movements; what might be considered "anticommunist" about the play is its picturing a lack of charity that begins at home.

As playwriting, Red Gloves again reveals Sartre's ability to melodramatize ideas, to make a story suddenly flash with "theater" or a speech with intensity. But Red Gloves takes a good half of the evening to become interesting, and never becomes impressive. Between the two extremes of which Sartre is master--the phony thrill and the incisive speech--lies a whole human world he barely grazes; his situations ring hollow, his people seem paperbacked. Only Hoederer, in Actor Boyer's fine portrayal, has shape or color; indeed, the best of Red Gloves is what Boyer brings to it.

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