New Play in Manhattan

Anne of the Thousand Days (by Maxwell Anderson; produced by the Playwrights' Company & Leland Hay ward) is yet another shot at history for Maxwell Anderson, and very likely another hit. From the turbulent story of Henry VIII's Anne Boleyn, Playwright Anderson has made a plump and gaudy stage piece, a thing of fierce desires, clashing wills, momentous acts. For love or lust of Anne, Henry divorced Catherine of Aragon, broke with Rome, opened an age of bloodshed; while the insolent and ambitious Anne would be Henry's queen or nothing at the start, still his queen or nothing at the end--preferring, in Mr. Anderson's account, the block to banishment.

In Anne's case, history itself proved a rattling good dramatist, and Anderson has certainly not played down the original script. Anne of the Thousand Days has scenes of spitting, highbusted theater, and a good many moments--early rather than late--when it is about equally fustian and fun. It is full of twists and contrasts--of Anne's hate turning to liking as Henry's liking turns to hate; of Henry's determination to have a son for the throne and Anne's determination to have a throne for her daughter (Elizabeth).

Though less tasseled and pentameter'd than Anderson's early history plays, Anne is still a thing of words--high speeches, soliloquies, numerous occasions where phrases that seem hot off the typewriter jostle others that seem worthy of black letter. At moments the language has energy, but in general whenever the poet in Anderson stirs, the playwright distinctly suffers.

Cinemactor Rex Harrison plays Henry nimbly enough, but by trying for the man inside the monarch winds up neither very real nor very royal. Small, blonde English

Joyce Redman plays at the level of the script, in tragedy-queen style with plenty of pedal; and whether right or not for Anne, is completely right for Anderson.

The box-office outlook for Anne of the Thousand Days yanks the ten-year-old Playwrights' Company out of a slump that had threatened to end a unique Broadway team. Last season, for the first time since it was formed by Maxwell Anderson, S. N. Behrman, Sidney Howard, Elmer Rice and Robert E. Sherwood, the partners could not dig up a play among them; Broadway wondered loudly whether the old hands had lost their grip. Now the Playwrights plan to follow Anne with four more in the current season.

When the Playwrights first teamed up, they pooled cash ($10,000 apiece) and experience so that each could get, in Anderson's words, "a better chance to say his independent say than we had as lone travelers in the pretty desperate profit jungle [around] Times Square." Of the cynics who gave the project six months, Rice demanded: "What the hell does a producer do that we can't do?"

Nothing, it seemed. The first season they rang up three hits: Sherwood's Abe Lincoln in Illinois, Anderson's Knickerbocker Holiday, Behrman's No Time for Comedy. When things looked dark in 1945, Rice's Dream Girl kept the group going.

In recent years, the Playwrights have slowed down. Howard died before one of his plays could be produced. Behrman quit because he shrank from the managerial decisions imposed by the system. Composer Kurt Weill joined, but that still left the company with only three dramatists-- and a lagging output. This season, however, the Playwrights have a real prospect of getting new blood: Garson Kanin (whose new play is on their current schedule), Ruth Gordon and Thornton Wilder.

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