New Plays in Manhattan

Clutterbuck (by Benn W. Levy; produced by Irving L. Jacobs in association with David Merrick) is one of those "trifles light as air"--and very welcome in a theater where they are usually heavy as lead. Unlike most writers whose subject is sex and whose object is laughter, Playwright Levy (Springtime for Henry) possesses the gleaming eye of wit and the gloved hand of worldliness. Clutterbuck has the usual drawbacks of paper-thin comedy but it offers a good deal more than the usual rewards.

The play chronicles a cruise taken by two old school friends (Ruth Ford and Ruth Matteson) with their dissimilar and discordant husbands, one a businessman (Arthur Margetson), the other a novelist (Tom Helmore). The wives shortly espy a tourist named Clutterbuck (Charles Campbell) on whom they had both, it transpires, bestowed their pre-matrimo-nial favors. Simultaneously the husbands discover they have both enjoyed the pre-matrimonial favors of Clutterbuck's wife (Claire Carleton). From there in, the play concentrates on how the six of them purr and perspire, recall the past and are moved to repeat it; on their catting and torn catting, their hurried feints and sudden swoons.

Clutterbuck suffers acutely at times from deckchair gabble and shipboard sameness. Yet it is very often -- particularly during an act spent ashore -- both effervescent and funny. It boasts such small ingenuities as having Clutterbuck never utter a word; such larger achievements as making Mrs. Clutterbuck a fine blend of sappiness and wisdom. The show is the better, too, for good ensemble acting and--in Norris Houghton--a director who knows that with any souffle it is timing that counts most.

The Closing Door (by Alexander Knox; produced by Cheryl Crawford) is melodrama that raids psychopathology for its thrills. What its door is closing on, with what threatens to be a deafening bang, is the sanity of the hero. Sullen, suspicious, harrowed by dark memories, Vail Trahern (Alexander Knox) can still, after a quieting talk with his wife (Doris Nolan), agree to go to a sanitarium for treatment. Then, thrown off balance again, he runs off, has somebody else turn up at the sanitarium in his name, and steals back home to precipitate a ghastly mess.

Seldom has a melodrama flashed so many tricks of the trade--pianos, radios, telephones, striking clocks, blinking lights, swinging doors, even false statements in the program. Yet The Closing Door is much more seriously written than the usual thriller and is full of clinical detail and therapeutic advice, some of it Freud and some of it scrambled. If this adds to the weight of the play, it only proves, in terms of good melodrama, a dead weight. Toward the end, however, as the adolescent events that poisoned Vail's life emerge simultaneously with the frightful method he took to find release, The Closing Door achieves an extremely gruesome ten minutes.

Even so, it is a gruesomeness that frays the nerves rather than tingles the spine. The Closing Door is not particularly boring; it's just not much fun. Something unpleasantly oppressive about the play is accentuated by something peculiarly awkward in the playwrighting. Actor Knox, with his very low-keyed but believable performance as Vail, proves Playwright Knox's strongest ally.

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