Double Jeopardy

The first play by London's zooming Christopher Fry to reach Broadway made news twice last week: first because it opened, then because it closed. A Phoenix Too Frequent was a poor choice for a debut: from the briefest of short stories, Fry had made a very long one-act play. The wit and poetry that glow brightly in his The Lady's Not For Burning (TIME, April 24) merely glint and flicker in Phoenix. But on Broadway Phoenix was as much victim as culprit: it was badly produced, and had to share the billing with something very bad indeed.

Phoenix is a blowup of Petronius' famous 1,900-year-old yarn, The Matron of Ephesus. It tells of an inconsolable widow mourning at her husband's bier; and of the soldier who .happens in and consoles her so wondrously that, when someone steals the body he was supposed to guard, she offers her husband's in its place. Petronius tosses the yarn off like a firecracker; Fry draws it out like an accordion, often brightening the proceedings but sadly blunting the effect. Heavy staging blunted it further.

Completing the damage was Kenneth White's Freight, concerned with a boxcar encounter between a group of frightened Negroes and a taunting Southern white. The author was obviously so obsessed with the idea of racial injustice that he never even got close to the reality, never for a minute escaped shattering dullness.

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