Old Play in Manhattan

Mrs. Warren's Profession (by George Bernard Shaw; produced by Theatre Venture) inaugurated a Greenwich Village enterprise with a play not seen on Broadway for almost 30 years. Some reviewers laced into the play as though it were as scandalous to revive anything so dated as it was once considered to produce anything so daring.

After 56 years, the greater part of Mrs. Warren is utter deadwood--obsolete in method, lean on wit, smacking of 19th-century melodrama. In 1950, it is much more of a problem play for directors than for theatergoers. In general, the current production is weak. But the two crucial scenes between Mrs. Warren and her daughter ring out with a forthright vigor and vibrancy; and Mrs. Warren (Estelle Winwood) is played with decided style, her daughter (Louisa Horton) with fine sobriety. Twice Mrs. Warren's Profession booms like a great-bellied old clock, even if it otherwise runs painfully slow and even stops dead.

Taken together, the two big scenes are profoundly Shavian. In the first, the college-bred daughter understands and forgives her slum-born mother for having made a living out of brothels. In the second, she denounces her mother for making a fortune out of them. As a notorious woman's daughter, Vivie is naturally stiff-necked and stern in judgment; as a bad woman who has tried to be a good mother, Kitty Warren is naturally sentimental and defensive. Their personal relationship--beyond all considerations of economics or ethics--is irreconcilable. Few Broadway playwrights now in full bloom would be able or willing to write two such powerful scenes.

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