New Plays in Manhattan

Make Way for Lucia (by John van Druten, based on E. F. Benson's novels; produced by the Theatre Guild) tells of a showoff English widow (Isabel Jeans) who settles down for the summer of 1912 in a buzzing English village. Christened Emmeline but always called Lu-chee-a, she also affects gaily soulful garments, ostentatiously moves from the easel to the pianoforte, dabbles in Italian, and occasionally drops into baby talk.

With her, and settling down as her next-door neighbor, has come a dilettantish, old-maidish male (Cyril Ritchard). Against her, from the moment she arrives, is the formidable Miss Mapp, a manhunting, stop-at-nothing Nosey Parker (Catherine Willard). The struggle for primacy between the two women--Lucia's efforts to dethrone Miss Mapp as a tyrant, Miss Mapp's to unmask Lucia as a fraud--produces a series of mock-heroic crescendos and climaxes.

A double exposure of the precious and the provincial, a caricature of manners and a comedy of airs, Make Way for Lucia is as full of gentility and small jabs as an old-fashioned pin cushion. Some of it is pleasant fun; virtually all of it gains from Mr. van Druten's deft and mannerly use of E. F. Benson's yellowing Lucia novels, and from the amusing exaggerations of a capable cast. What cuts down on the fun in Lucia is the too-great sameness of the cutting-up. The fun itself tends to be pretty thin and chirrupy. At times, indeed, the ruffled plumage and screechy fighting suggest a bird cage more than a drawing room.

Oh, Mr. Meadowbrook! (by Ronald Telfer and Pauline Jamerson; produced by John Yorke) is a bedroom farce that should have been left in the attic. Under his psychoanalyst's orders, a mousy, middle-aged English taxidermist (Ernest Truex) stalks sex on a Connecticut weekend. All the women in the house beat a path to his door--the housekeeper (Sylvia Field), the hostess (Grace McTarnahan) and a worldly lady playwright with heart of brass (Vicki Cummings).

The authors make the business of turning mouse into man a single-tracked exercise in tortured double meanings and thin, three-cornered situations. Truex can dig a coy toe into the carpet with the best of the professional Milquetoasts; he can be equally amusing as a self-fancied Don Juan who struts only to trip. But here he is the victim of a greater incongruity--a script that manages to make sex look pretty stale.

The Victors (translated from the French of Jean-Paul Sartre by Thornton Wilder; produced by New Stages, Inc.) is sponsored by the same experimental group that last season made a bandbox hit, and then a Broadway hit, of Sartre's The Respectful Prostitute. The new production is by no means so likely to triumph at the box office: it is very little more convincing than The Respectful Prostitute was, and it is a good deal less exciting and scandalous.

Set in Southern France during the summer of 1944, The Victors treats of a few captured members of the Resistance and of their Vichyite captors. For about half the way, it is a chronicle of torture: the desperate bravery of the Maquis in refusing to talk, the fiendish brutality of the Vichyites in trying to make them. The prisoners, afraid that a youngster among them will sooner or later be tormented into blabbing, strangle him.

In time, however, the play largely abandons the physical for the metaphysical. The victims come to feel completely alienated from their leader because he has not known, as they have, either the agony of torture or the degradation of being tortured; between captured and captors develops a terrific desire to make the other party feel psychologically defeated; more & more the prisoners of the Vichyites are motivated by pride rather than patriotism. The pity continues to take odd and sudden turns right to the end.

There is no lack of either a mind or a theater mind in The Victors--it is as charged with ideas as with harsh melodrama. The fault, in fact, lies just that way--in a too-muchness of everything that becomes a form of melodrama in itself. In piling up too many motives, in piling on too much horror, the play loses its impact. The characters get to be much less human beings than mere Existencils; the ideas lack value because Sartre insists on using them as bombs rather than light bulbs. For all its intellectualism, The Victors is so crammed to the brim with lurid scenes and dated dramaturgy that there is a strange air about it of the Franco-Prussian War.

Jenny Kissed Me (by Jean Kerr; produced by James Russo, Michael Ellis and Alexander H. Cohen in association with Clarence M. Shapiro) is a cheery little bore that needs more art in its artlessness. It tells of a crotchety parish priest who, tired of having his housekeeper's solemn, scrubbed-looking niece around the rectory, sets about sprucing her up as a means to getting her spliced. In the end, he succeeds in transforming her into such a glamor girl that she gets the very man she wants.

As prickly Father Moynihan, engrossed in his scheme, Leo G. Carroll (Angel Street, The Late George Apley) is adroit as always, but he cannot do much more than brighten things up the way flowers do a sickroom. Everything in Jenny Kissed Me is well meant and almost nothing is well handled: it dawdles when it should skip, and sits gabbily on when it should make its excuses and go.

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