New Play in Manhattan

Forward the Heart (by Bernard Reines; produced by Theatre Enterprises, Inc. & Leon J. Bronesky) attempts to treat a compound social fracture--always a ticklish business. Playwright Reines's double-problem play first shows a young painter who has been blinded in the War and is bitterly unadjusted. Only when he falls in love with his mother's sympathetic, intelligent young maid does life seem worth living. Then he discovers that the maid is a Negro.

Horrified for a moment, he finds that he still loves her and wants to marry her. She, in spite of loving him, knows better about marriage--much better after she overhears his mother's fierce, shocked remonstrances. He alone refuses to give up, and when the girl goes away, he makes plans to find her.

A deeply earnest play, Forward the Heart is now & then a dramatic one. In the main roles, William Prince (The Eve of St. Mark, John Loves Mary) does well enough and Mildred Joanne Smith (St. Louis Woman, Set My People Free) very well. Yet Forward the Heart sharply fails. It mingles two such general problems as race and rehabilitation to produce the most special of stories--one that calls less for earnestness than intensity. It is a story to be treated, if at all, in terms of tragic irony rather than realistic protest. As realism, the play can no more achieve an artistic resolution than it can supply a practical answer. As realism, it also suffers a good deal from very seldom seeming real. Author Reines is always too conscious of his social issues, too ready with a speech. What is most disastrous of all, the actual writing is far too often inept.

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