Continuity, Inc.

A well-paced revival of G. B. Shaw's Saint Joan, starring Cinemactress Jean Arthur and directed by Harold (The Member of the Wedding) Clurman, played to capacity audiences in Washington's National Theatre last week. Despite its success, Saint Joan was not headed straight for Broadway. It had already played in Wilmington and would take a 28-week tour of 18 other U.S. cities before hitting Manhattan. Gamble though it is, Joan's tour is less unusual than the company that financed it.

Producers Theatre, Inc. is a far cry from the usual one-shot partnership of Broadway show backers. It is a longterm, well-knit marriage of business acumen and theatrical talent. Its sparkplug is dynamic Real-Estate Tycoon Roger L. Stevens, who engineered the 1951 purchase of the Empire State Building and its sale last month.

A producer in his own right (Twelfth Night), Stevens teamed up last fall with topnotch Broadway Producer Robert (The Time of the Cuckoo) Whitehead and fellow Tycoon Robert Dowling (City Investing Co.) to form a glittering $1,000,000 triumvirate. Its aims: "To produce plays and operate playhouses" on a businesslike, year-round basis--and to take risks for art's sake as well as to make a profit.

Despite a late start last season, the triumvirate sponsored two plays: T.S. Eliot's Confidential Clerk, Liam O'Brien's The Remarkable Mr. Pennypacker. Neither lost money; Clerk stirred up a critics' controversy. This year Producer Whitehead will present Clifford (Golden Boy) Odets' new The Flowering Peach, plus a pair of plays still in the works. With three Broadway theaters leased, Stevens & Co. will have a sure home for Saint Joan when it gets to Manhattan in April, will have no trouble booking its riskier productions. More important, if Joan's tour (weekly cost: $23,000) pays its way, its producers plan to send at least two or three plays on pre-Broadway tours each year.

With Stevens a member of the Playwrights Co. and Dowling also a power in ANTA (American National Theatre & Academy), all three members of Producers Theatre, Inc. stay close to Broadway. In its beehive offices on Times Square, a score of picked young actors meet thrice weekly to read and recite; from them, Producer Whitehead hopes to build up a topnotch repertory group. In Venice, P.T. is already filming The Time of the Cuckoo (star: Katharine Hepburn). But the triumvirate is just beginning to branch out. Tycoon Dowling hopes eventually to put actors, directors and playwrights on a salary status, "as at General Motors," so that talented people can stay in the theater instead of being forced to go elsewhere to earn a living. Says Businessman Stevens: "Above all, we are trying to put continuity into the theater."

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