New Plays in Manhattan

The Magic and the Loss (by Julian Funt) is an adult but unharmonized play. In some degree it is unharmonized, perhaps, through being adult. The play raises a complex of questions; and even if it is not so old-fashioned as to try to answer them, it cannot altogether clothe and dramatize them, either. Playwright Funt tells of Grace Wilson (Uta Hagen), a divorced Manhattan career woman. Grace is gunning for a much bigger job at her advertising agency. She has an agency executive (Lee Bowman) for a lover, a 14-year-old son (Charles Taylor) who stumbles onto the love affair, and an ex-husband, a West Coast professor (Robert Preston), who comes east on a visit and captures the boy's affections.

Grace's various problems both interlock and collide: the struggle for the job helps lose her lover; the presence of the lover alienates the boy. The deepest problem of all is that fierce drive inside herself that makes bosses, husbands and lovers shy away, and makes her simultaneously bitter about a "man's world." With a final slightly pat irony, Grace gets the big job only because the man who is given first pick wants too much money.

The play is honestly and in spots movingly written. It is also well staged and acted, with Actress Hagen brilliantly right as Grace. Its content is valid; the chief trouble is a kind of clash between form and content. By relying on a naturalistic method, the play comes to need the greater fullness and freedom of the novel. There are too many problems in The Magic -- indeed, too many potential problem plays--for it to focus quite right, or reverberate enough on the stage. Thus, for lack of elbow room, the play has Grace, within minutes, faced with the loss of job, child and lover. The lover, having served his turn, is folded up and pushed out of sight like a card table. The naturalistic method necessitates at times too melodramatic a pace, at other times too moralistic a demonstration.

Yet the demonstration is generally sound, and the people are not overdrawn. In his chronicle of one woman, Playwright Funt is examining a citified, slick, aware, pedigreed-dog-eat-dog way of life. It needs more vibrantly expressive treatment in stage form; yet it rings truer, even as it stands, than most things that adorn the Broadway stage.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.