New Plays in Manhattan

The Small Hours (by George S. Kaufman & Leueen MacGrath; produced by Max Gordon) is 26 scenes worth of life among big-shot Manhattan intellectuals. It displays them at sleek dinner parties, in cabs and sport cars, in offices and boudoirs, at smart restaurants and resorts. It shows them two-timing and double-crossing, ladling out flattery, dishing up scandal. It portrays in particular the Mitchell family--a brilliant, middle-aged publisher (Paul McGrath), his selfish daughter, his muddled son, and his wife Laura (Dorothy Stickney), who is clumsy and crushed in a world at once beyond and beneath her. But Laura ends up a kind of worm who turns and, when her family come to grief, becomes its strongest member.

Playwrights Kaufman & MacGrath (Mrs. Kaufman) have written the latest of many price-of-success stories. Appearances, they make clear, can be even more deceitful than their own hard worldlings --in the small hours, the worldlings themselves feel small and lonely. When the play displays the Kaufman gifts for satiric comment and social chatter, it is entertaining and, now & again, incisive. But it emerges less comedy than drama, and less drama than a problem-play department store--3rd Floor: Career Women, Psychic Paralysis, Drugs; 4th Floor: Infidelity, Homosexuality, Adjustment Bureau. Often the elevator has scarcely time to stop, keeps rushing on--5th Floor: Duty Salon, Freudian Snack Bar.

It moves too fast to become boring. Mr. Kaufman's direction, Miss Stickney's performance and Donald Oenslager's sets are all helpful. But The Small Hours is not just unconvincing and overstuffed, with serial-story sentiment opposed to coldhearted sophistication. Far too often, it is flashy as well, and merely helps to illustrate what it presumably sets out to expose.

Not for Children (by Elmer Rice; produced by the Playwrights' Company) proved that famous playwrights can also be foolish ones. Elmer Rice attempted to stand a lot of theatrical old hat in the corner while standing the theater itself on its head. Elliott Nugent, as a lecturer who hated the theater, and Betty Field, as one who loved it, sat at opposite ends of the stage and carried on an evening-long comment. The play involved a playwright whose own play involved all the players in Playwright Rice's; and while spoofing onstage setups, it highlighted backstage antics.

Any two-hour-long prank is dangerous; this one was sheer disaster, and closed at week's end. Playwright Rice seemed to forget that cliches of satire can be every bit as mildewed as cliches of stagecraft. Result: an evening of heavy bowling balls that collided and careened while the tenpins remained untouched.

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