New Play in Manhattan

Time Out for Ginger (by Ronald Alexander) has a pretty familiar setup: a middle-class household of mother, father, outspoken servant and three teen-age girls. The fillip is that the youngest junior miss behaves like a junior mister and goes out for the high-school football team. Father, between having always wanted a son and having recently declaimed in public that the young should be free to do what they want, first sportingly and then stubbornly backs Ginger up. Soon the whole town's talking; next father's job at the bank is endangered. Fortunately Ginger, once she has scored a touchdown, goes swiftly feminine and casts off spiked shoes for satins.

The town makes a great deal too much of Ginger's behavior, and so does the author. In fact, a girl football player has far more shock than story value, while even as a comic crusade, father's belief in freedom of the running play seems a far cry from freedom of speech.

The hard-working plot of Time Out for Ginger is both a little too silly and a little too jumbled, and the teen-age daughters not only are comic-strip themselves, but are raucously wooed by comic striplings. Yet a good deal of Time Out is thoroughly amiable, and a fair amount of the show is amusing.

When the young have been banished, and Melvyn Douglas, Polly Rowles and Philip Loeb perform as the husband, the wife and the bank president, the play takes on a nice aimless, bantering good humor. But things are a bit askew when a plot must go out for a walk before the play can be any fun.

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