New Plays in Manhattan

The Solid Gold Cadillac (by Howard Teichmann & George S. Kaufman) is at best goldplated, but that still leaves it considerably brighter than most current Broadway comedies. Furthermore, it proves a perfect vehicle for Josephine Hull, who exhibits her best You Can't Take It With You and Arsenic and Old Lace manner.

The authors have written what they call a fairy tale--a good enough term for what it would be hard to call a play. In it, Miss Hull is an exactress who is also a tiny stockholder in a vast corporation. She attends a public stockholders' meeting, asks embarrassing questions and, as a way of being shushed, is hired by the company. Once installed, she engineers shake-ups and scandals, and at the end is head of the corporation.

As a satiric fantasy, The Solid Gold Cadillac very faintly suggests The Madwoman of Chaillot: here, too, an old lady tackles and triumphs over hardheaded tycoons; here, too, are aired some of the shadier ways of high finance. But no two plays could be less alike in spirit, nor, for that matter, has Cadillac even a touch of the poetry or wistfulness of a fairy tale. A thing of gags and gadgets, of blackouts, movie shots and the loudspeaker voice of Fred Allen, Cadillac is satire that is always hurrying off into routine farce. Its corporation characters are the merest cardboard. But it has a lot of funny lines, and it has dumpy, inimitable Veteran Hull. Her stage reminiscences are not the least of her charms. "Shakespeare," she recalls, "is so tiring. You never get a chance to sit down unless you're a king."

The unhappy side of the play is that it is the purest Broadway--laughs or nothing. It has a funnybone without a spine; it could almost be described as a satire without a viewpoint. It seem's put together with the very pins it sticks in others, though at its satiric best it can draw blood from cardboard. And since, at her best, Actress Hull can squeeze laughs out of a turnip, The Solid Gold Cadillac provides a nice, enjoyable evening.

Kind Sir (by Norman Krasna) reached Broadway to a fanfare of trumpets, with $750,000 in advance sales already in the till. A Joshua Logan production starring Charles Boyer and (in her first nonsinging role) Mary Martin, its opulent costumes and decor half suggest that Miss Martin is still playing musicomedy. The whole thing may well prove the greatest letdown of the season; it is a sumptuous bore and a gilded vacuum.

The play is not an ordinary romantic trifle, but a sophisticated one--a Boyer Meets Girl. Its love-making is the kind that puts the couch before the altar, with Actress Martin as an unmarried stage star, and Boyer a State Department charmer who pretends to be married so that no lady he woos can ever expect him to marry her. In due time, Miss Martin finds out that the deceiver is a bachelor, attempts revenge and, of course, achieves matrimony.

Playwright Krasna's pennyworth of wit and plot is about as much help to the proceedings as a sliver of ice to a long summer drink. And Kind Sir seems hardly more wicked than it is witty. Moreover, the production--instead of obeying the rule for froth, and moving as fast and lightly as possible--is all in regal slow-motion, like a Coronation rehearsal. Actress Martin cannot fail to be personally engaging, but her portentous pauses and rather statuesque poses are a mistake. Boyer's role allows an excellent actor no chance to act, and he can only exert a matinee-idol charm. Except to watch its two stars at far from their best, there can be no reason to see Kind Sir at all.

The Trip to Bountiful (by Horton Foote) concerns that second most ticklish menage a trois--the husband, the wife, and the husband's mother. The wife, in this case, is a giddy, shallow Texas shrew who browbeats her mother-in-law while exploiting her; the husband is too frightened to interfere; and the mother-in-law is a gentle, unhappy widow who likes Houston hardly better than her home life, and yearns for the small town of Bountiful where she lived long ago. In time she runs away to it, and is briefly happy among its ghosts before being forced back to the city.

The Trip is an honestly meant play by a competent playwright. But it puts Playwright Foote in much the same plight as his old Mrs. Watts. In a sense, he is running away from his material--and to as ghostly a destination. What begins as sharp domestic drama drifts into the sort of mild fantasy that seems, at its worst, mere filler. Once his old lady runs away, Playwright Foote can do nothing more than improvise, temporize, insert those small episodes in bus stations and buses that pay off as scenes but bankrupt the play as a whole. The play, furthermore, misses real poignancy from going too plainly in search of it; something of a human being at the outset, Mrs. Watts is nothing, at the end, except pathetic and forlorn.

As Mrs. Watts. Lillian Gish garnered excited reviews. Hers is indeed a good performance--though of a character that remains uninteresting. As the daughter-in-law, Jo Van Fleet is often vividly and hatefully alive. Both actresses deserve a better play.

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