Comeback

Since a noisy to-do over the exclusion of Negroes shut the National Theatre as a playhouse 19 months ago, Washington has been the only major capital in the world without a professional legitimate theater. Last week theater-loving Washingtonians celebrated the end of the stage blackout--and the heady prospect that the next few months will find two playhouses operating in the city.

What finally brought the theater back to Washington was nothing loftier than the fact that the bottom had dropped out of burlesque at the old Gayety, so the management went legit. For the New Gayety's opening with a touring company of The Barretts of Wimpole Street, starring Susan Peters, honky-tonk Ninth Street bloomed with klieg lights and dinner-jacketed Congressmen and diplomats.

Two shabby blocks down Ninth Street from the New Gayety, the 2,000-seat Strand was about ready last week to end its 25 years as a movie house and become a legitimate theater. Balked in its attempt to lease the old Belasco from the Government, which uses it as a Treasury Department storehouse, the American National Theatre and Academy (ANTA) expected to close a deal soon to take over .the Strand.

With other managements plainly willing to go along with the Actors' Equity ruling that Negroes must be admitted to the audience, would Marcus Heiman's National Theatre come around? The National was losing money showing second-run movies, but Heiman still resisted. It was not the Negro-exclusion issue that bothered him, he indicated, but something else: "We will not permit a labor union to interfere with management or policy."

In the sudden swirl of theatrical plans and promises, no one else even mentioned the original cause of Washington's 19 theaterless months. At some point during the long drought, the main issue seemed to have died.

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