New Plays in Manhattan

The Crucible (by Arthur Miller) shows more fieriness of purpose than of vision. The author of Death of a Salesman has turned back to 1692 and the Salem witchcraft trials, clearly gripped by their hideous drama, clearly haunted by a conviction of their relevance today. He has watched, across the centuries, the hallucinations of children and the hearsay of grownups swell to an epidemic of accusations and arrests, confessions and hangings. In that unhappy time, any human doubt or protest was called the work of the devil, and the one way to avoid punishment lay in confession of guilt. In the foreground of this Bay Colony drama stands a young wife accused of witchcraft by a slut with whom her husband has sinned, with the husband, at the end, going forth to die.

As a demonstration of how much deviltry can go into the fighting of devils, The Crucible is often grimly instructive. Many of its scenes have real theatrical power. The play at its best is hard-hitting sociological melodrama, though even here it would gain from fewer and more sharply aimed blows. And helped by performances from Arthur Kennedy, Walter Hampden, Beatrice Straight, E. G. Marshall and others, Jed Harris has staged the play with consistent though conventional vigor.

At more ambitious levels, The Crucible falls short, for one thing because it is much more interested in manifestations than motives, more preoccupied with the how of Salem than the why. It is what the story stresses, more than the story itself, that reveals its bifocal nature, its linking of "witch-hunting" past & present, its absorption with parallels--despite the axiom that parallel lines never meet. Moral indignation rather than insight has combed over the facts; and in the end The Crucible not only omits something from its picture of Salem, but takes the life out of its inhabitants. The psychological tragedy of fierce Calvinist repression that erupted in the hysterical visions of young girls, and exploded in the hysterical reactions of their elders, is badly slighted in The Crucible; through blurring what is the real point of Salem, Miller makes mere wraiths and mouthpieces of his characters. The play is curiously unmoving; while its foreground story is even without sociological relevancy. Turning on a slut's purely malicious lie, it is a kind of primitive Children's Hour inlaid into the larger picture.

Where a work of art seems to operate at several levels, The Crucible seems made in several segments. It is in part a documentary (based, with some juggling, on 17th century facts), in part a parable with a 20th century application, in part a forthright melodrama. None of these constitutes a high form of art, and Miller, in binding them together, has provided force, but not artistic heightening. The material seems not there for the sake of the play, but the play for the sake of the material.

Mid-Summer (by Vina Delmar) is sentimental domestic comedy with all the trimmings. In it, the author of Bad Girl evokes a splotchy New York in 1907--sizzling heat, squalid family-hotel life, period clothes. In it, the author of Bad Girl has turned out a kind of Good Girl, or at any rate good wife. A tale of a young couple on their uppers--he a schoolteacher bitten with the theater bug, she warmhearted and illiterate--it makes every stop along the matinee route, with the passengers in the audience dabbing their handkerchiefs instead of waving them.

There is a rewarding extra element, however: the play has a brilliant and raved-over new actress, and Broadway an almost certain new star. As the wife, blonde Geraldine Page--previously known only for an off-Broadway performance in Summer and Smoke--shows great personal charm and unusual technical skill. In a role that at moments proves more hindrance than help, she makes goodness seem real, and the commonplace deeply touching.

Mid-Summer boasts a good precocious kid's part, which Ben Hecht's nine-year-old daughter Jenny fits to a T. As the stagestruck husband, Hollywood's Mark Stevens comes through with some of vaudeville's once-famous routines. For the rest, there are all kinds of period touches--brass bed, plumed hats and an old family trunk, from which Playwright Delmar perhaps dug up the bulk of her play.

Geraldine Page, 28, a tall (5 ft. 8 in.), light-boned Missouri girl with a wispy voice offstage, appeared in a Methodist Church play at 17 and has wanted to be "a fine actress" ever since. "I knew I wouldn't make money at first," she says, "so I very carefully kept my taste down to peanut butter."

For four years she played stock in Lake Zurich and Woodstock, Ill. Then, after some odd jobs in a few minor shows in New York, she began studying with Uta Hagen, finally hit her stride in 1952 when she got a part at Manhattan's little Circle-in-the-Square theater, in Federico Garcia Lorca's Yerma. Geraldine supplemented her salary ($10 a week) as a factory worker, negligee model and hat-check girl. Her next play at the Circle was Tennessee Williams' Summer and Smoke, and Broadway critics began spreading superlatives about a "new star." The good word even won her a bit-part in the movie Taxi (filmed in New York). With Mid-Summer, her first Broadway show, her salary jumped from Summer and Smoke's $40 to more than $300 a week.

Awed by her overnight success in Mid-Summer, Geraldine finds it hard to shake off the old peanut-butter life. Last week she was planning to move out of her tiny, one-room Greenwich Village apartment into a larger one uptown. But first on her list was a visit to a stylist who for a lump sum will provide dresses, coats, etc. befitting a new star. Says Geraldine happily: "I'm going to give her a bunch of money and say, 'Do me!'':

The Fifth Season (by Sylvia Regan) has to do with Manhattan's garment industry. So does the title: on Seventh Avenue there are five seasons--spring, summer, fall, winter and slack. In Miss Regan's farce, things are slack to start with and touch & go all the way. Heading the cast and gamely shouldering the burden are Yiddish Theater Comedian Menasha Skulnik and Broadway Veteran Richard Whorf. Skulnik, a mournful-looking, richly accented, frequently funny comic, handles the humor; Whorf, the drama. A married man who guiltily sins with a model, Whorf makes this part of his role as convincing in itself as it is out of key with the rest of the play.

With wonderful impartiality, the play admits shenanigans and sentiment, parades live models and dead wheezes, has touches of realism and great chunks of hokum. The Fifth Season comes, theatrically, from a very dull and noisy family: what is surprising is not that so much of it is painful, but that some of it--thanks to Skulnik--is fun.

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