New Plays in Manhattan

The Tender Trap (by Max Shulman and Robert Paul Smith) is the usual trap set for bachelors--with the usual outcome.

Thirty-five-year-old Charlie Reader is not just the usual bachelor, however; he is part of what the authors portray as a special Manhattan breed--men besieged in their own apartments by an endless stream of attractive, obliging, gift-bearing women who are also more than happy to cook or clean house for monsieur. In the face of such good fortune, Charlie (well-played by Ronny Graham) has not the slightest desire to marry.

To complicate matters, Charlie's married pal from back home (Robert Preston) arrives in New York on business, and is pretty envious of Charlie's lot, but even more disapproving. He so sprays the atmosphere with the idea of matrimony that Charlie becomes engaged to two girls at once; a little later Boy loses Girls; thereafter, the big question of the evening is which one will he regain.

The play gets some amusement out of its gaudy claim that virtually any Manhattan bachelor who bathes regularly and has a steady job can lead the life of Don Juan just by answering the doorbell. The play is also rather amusingly penetrated with the idea that to all married men and single women the bachelor state--quite irrespective of a bachelor's habits--is thoroughly shocking. On the pleasant side, too, are more attractive girls--Kim Hunter, Janet Riley, Julia Meade and Parker McCormick--than turn up in many a musical.

But the play is unsatisfying; it lacks the right touch and tone. Its setup calls for something cool, smooth, quietly disdainful; far too often it is given something Broadwayish and breezy--stretches in which grown-men exchange banter about sex and a scene of disheveled, morning-after, mail-order farce. There is too palpable an air of We Aim To Please about it, and of aiming to please the very far from fussy.

Fragile Fox (by Norman Brooks) is a competent, routine thriller about World War II. It tells, in the italics of melodrama, of a company--commanded by a craven, drunken, swaggering captain--that is suddenly thrown into the Battle of the Bulge. Loathed by his men, the captain gets by with his ambition-ridden colonel because he is the son of an influential political boss in the colonel's home state. To the rumble of tanks and the rat-tat-tat of gunfire, the gutless captain wobbles, crosses up his men, plots to run out on the job, and is finally shot by his most levelheaded subordinate.

Fragile Fox bangs through three acts, tossing at the audience a large variety of theatrical explosives. Blood is shed, broken bones are set, orders are defied, prisoners are shot, characters swear and curse, reel forward and roll backward. The characters themselves range from the comic to the psychopathic, the believable to the incredible; the incidents sometimes recall the war, rather oftener recall other war plays.

All this is realistically set down in a modern idiom that yet lacks any personal idiom. At any serious level. Fragile Fox has a ten-year-after quality that, though it might have provided new perspective, seems merely ten years too late. This is not fatal, for the play is primarily a thriller. If it is a merely adequate thriller, the trouble perhaps lies less with the script than with the staging. Given a more expert noisiness, a more authoritative crackle, a far more imaginative violence--and with every one of the G.I. jokes perfectly timed--Fragile Fox might prove absorbing theater.

Sing Me No Lullaby (by Robert Ardrey) seeks to dramatize some very thorny issues. Staging a reunion of a group of friends who were young and eager in the '30s, it assembles, in effect, certain attitudes and dilemmas that have become prominent since. The once-aspiring politician is embitteredly fed up with politics; the fighter has become a cynical public-relations man. Such people have been driven toward negativism; Mike Hertzog. who had been strongly leftist till the Soviet-Nazi pact, has been hounded into nothingness. He has lost his Government job and every succeeding job, and now in desperation plans to get out of the U.S. the one way he can--by being smuggled to the Russians he despises. This appalling (but aborted) plan flays the politician back into politics.

Though never shrill or doctrinaire, the play fails, possibly through its very approach. Its disturbed author is concerned with what he things is a timid and jittery temper of the country, unawake to injustice. But instead of translating his view into an expressive picture or cohesive story, he has blueprinted it with mere walking symptoms and symbolic cases. Didactically working with viewpoints instead of people, he never gives his play leverage; nor, from using such a variety of figures, can he truly plumb any one of them. Vividly portrayed as a human being, a Mike Hertzog might emerge as genuinely tragic. Used as a mere symbol of persecution, he seems a mere stencil of protest. Even worse. Hertzog ends up as simply the thing that sends the politician back into the fight.

The play not only fails to get beyond the journalism of its subject: it isn't very vivid journalism. If this is partly because the writing and staging are almost stiltedly earnest, and because the characters never come to life, it is partly too because what might be termed the literature of anxiety (as opposed to that of outright protest) is full of intricacies and intangibles and resists simplifications. Playwright Ardrey's concern is not with correcting a particular abuse, it is with curing what he sees as a national sickness. Such a subject is not only highly complex; it is also not very dramatic.

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