New Plays in Manhattan

The Autumn Garden (by Lillian Hellman; produced by Kermit Bloomgarden) is a strikingly new kind of Lillian Hellman play. The plot is not at all striking and is secondary to the people; the people are pretty average people, neither vipers nor vixens. The scene is the South--an elegant summer boarding house run by a wellborn, middle-aged spinster. The guests are largely people of her own generation and kind--fiberless, frustrated people: a quiet, cynical drinker who has never married; a quiet-seeking general married to a fool; a confused young man halfheartedly about to marry the spinster's French niece.

Into this world after 23 years away from it, bursts the spinster's girlhood beau--a selfish, tinny charmer (Fredric March) who dabbles at art and meddles in lives--with the rich wife who knows him for what he is and even puts up with all he isn't. He buzzes, jollies, flirts, cajoles, tipsily involves the French niece in a minor small-town scandal. Though baseless in itself, the scandal manages to shake up the other people into auditing their close-to-bankrupt lives.

People, The Autumn Garden contends, are the products of all their past acts, so that for most of them the middle of the journey is equally the destination. The play's point--that lack of character is also fate--is driven sharply home. Its people,, though much alike in stature and background, are vividly drawn and brilliantly differentiated. Miss Hellman's portraits, without being unsympathetic, are adultly uncompromising.

What blurs and scatters the general effect is a need, not for a more dramatic plot, but for a more incisive pattern. The boarding house brings together numerous people not closely enough related to form a homogeneous group, nor sufficiently unrelated to create the diversified world-in-little of a Grand Hotel. There is not enough significant interplay; characters constantly mingle but seldom merge. There is rather the sort of populous, externally shared living that is the basis of social comedy. And the play offers effective social comedy through such types as a tart matriarch or a hen-brained gadder, or through the assorted disturbances caused by the returning beau.

Yet Miss Hellman's real emphasis is on separate frustrations and intimate crises, so that a Southern comedy of manners is always rubbing elbows with a Chekhovian study of character. And The Autumn Garden has the relaxed Chekhov method without his unifying lyrical mood--his sense that if people delude themselves, life is itself delusive. Actually Chekhov cuts deeper than Miss Hellman because, being a realist rather than a moralist, he very seldom grants his characters the ability to face the truth about themselves.

The Autumn Garden offers, along with the assured and vital gifts of an experienced playwright, the wavering and uncertain movement of a transitional play. It is greatly enhanced by the production: by Harold Clurman's staging, Howard Bay's set, the acting of Fredric March, Florence Eldridge, Ethel Griffies, Jane Wyatt, and most of all Joan Lorring in the difficult role of the niece.

The Moon Is Blue (by F. Hugh Herbert; produced by Richard Aldrich & Richard Myers in association with Julius Fleischmann) can be equally well described as a bright bit of fluff or a gay bit of fooling. Playwright Herbert has written a small comedy that remains obstinately idyllic while managing to seem pleasantly improper. The form is a Noel Cowardish conversation piece, but the formula is the purest Boy-Meets-Girl. Then Girl Meets Rakish Older Man, and for a second even seems inclined to meet him halfway. But in time, of course, Older Man Meets the Requirements of the Plot. The play begins and ends on the observation tower of the Empire State Building; and though, betweenwhiles, it shifts to the hero's bachelor apartment, it never really comes down to earth at all.

There are a few not very important drawbacks. Once in a while, though the hands are the hands of Hugh Herbert, the voice is The Voice of the Turtle. The patter at times is as monotonous as that of raindrops on a roof; and doubtless from being granted no firmer resting place, sex is always in the air. But the dialogue is far better than in most popular comedy, and the hero--as played by Barry Nelson--far pleasanter. The older man proves to be a wit as well as a wolf, and is urbanely played by Donald (Private Lives') Cook. Best of all, the girl is a delightfully uninhibited would-be actress whose confidences are very nearly as indiscreet as her questions; and she is played to perfection by Barbara Bel Geddes.

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