New Play in Manhattan

The Fourposter (by Jan de Hartog; produced by The Playwrights' Company) is a play with only two characters that slices up 30-odd years of marriage under the same roof into six period-costumed, eminently conjugal little playlets. There is the embarrassment of the wedding night, the excitement over the first baby, the crisis over the other woman, the husband in a dither about their teen-age son, the wife in the dumps after their daughter's wedding, the sale of the house and moving away.

The play is pap for sentimental housewives who, to begin with, love watching a husband & wife (Hume Cronyr & Jessica Tandy) play a husband & wife.* And though she is short on comedy? and he just short of farce, they play their roles well, give things a professional air. The play itself is full of the standard details and recognitions pf marriage: its conversational small change and domestic small changes, its emotional freezing and boiling points, male obstinacies and female whims. Some of these are lively, rather more are dull, but all are such cliches that the play could have been written by a man who wasn't even married, let alone a perceptive playwright. Far from displaying any pervasive insight, The Fourposter, for all its details, doesn't provide one new kind of stage glance on the wife's part, one unhackneyed snort by the husband.

*Another husband & wife, Rex Harrison & Lilli Palmer, are in Hollywood screening The Fourposter.

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