New Play in Manhattan

Reclining Figure (by Harry Kurnitz) is a comedy about an eccentric and difficult art collector, and his daughter and his dealers and his staff. Offered a fake Renoir. Lucas Edgerton feels for the first time a genuine enthusiasm--rather than mere acquisitive excitement--for a picture; and one of Playwright Kurnitz's twists is that, seeing the boss so jubilantly bamboozled. Edgerton's own cowed, stoogelike expert lacks the courage to enlighten him.

Reclining Figure provides a well-acted catalogue of art-world highjinks, of 57th Street dealers who are chiefly double-dealers, of competitiveness that seems more like conspiracy. The play takes some amusing potshots at these methods, and in the last act finally mixes the methods with a lively madness of its own. Helped by Percy Waram's deft performance, the play also gets some fun out of the crotchety Edgerton--for whom, plainly, Philadelphia's late great Collector Albert (Argyrol) Barnes was the inspiration.

But the play needs a great deal more inspiration than that. In Reclining Figure, art is long--exceedingly long during the first two acts. The play's chief asset, its nimble wisecracking, is also a liability. For it impedes the farcical explosiveness needed for so plot-heavy a yarn, and--brash even where it is funny--the wisecracking prevents Reclining Figure from being elegant or urbane. Writing of 57th Street, Playwright Kurnitz has caught Broadway's tone while missing its tempo.

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