A Shot for an Invalid

The Broadway theater, a fabulous invalid that lingers on & on, was about to get another shot in the arm. Last week Playwright-Biographer Robert (Idiot's Delight; Roosevelt and Hopkins) Sherwood announced that he had accepted the chairmanship of a new Council of the Living Theater. The plan is to launch "a nationwide campaign of education ... to arouse in more people a keener appreciation and zest for the whole theatrical experience as opposed to the frantic and transient interest in hit shows alone."

Supported by $54,000 from the League of New York Theaters, the campaign will run through 1951, Broadway's bicentennial year.* Among the "educational" efforts planned: a documentary film, a television show, a national essay contest, a traveling exhibition of theatrical Americana. Slogan of the campaign: "The play's the thing."

* According to historians, the first professional theater in Manhattan opened Jan. 8, 1751 in a converted warehouse on Nassau Street with a play called A Bold Stroke for a Wife.

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