New Plays in Manhattan

The Living Room (by Graham Greene) has, at worst, a very real value in the current theater: it brings darkness to light places. In this grim drama, which emerges as a kind of distinguished failure, Graham Greene begins where most of the successes leave off. Amid all its spiritual confusions, there is no touch of compromise, and though it clearly goes downhill, it never once turns off its own steeply rocky road.

The play concerns a young Roman Catholic girl who has become the mistress of a middle-aged married psychologist. She is deeply in love with him when, after her mother's death, she goes to live in a sort of religious Bleak House with two devout great-aunts and a paralyzed priest of a great-uncle. Her relatives exist in cramped fright, having sealed off--in their retreat from reality--room after room in which anyone has died. A wily, bigoted aunt first keeps the girl from running away with her lover. Then she forces the girl to confront her lover's neurotic wife and to grasp that beyond her own Catholic problem of sin, her lover is still bound by strong conjugal ties. When the girl turns imploringly to her great-uncle in his wheelchair, he tries--but in vain--to offer something more than mere platitudes and catchwords of faith; and the suffering girl commits suicide.

Greene has treated a common enough triangle story in religious rather than sociological--or even psychological--terms. The eye of God rather than of neighborhood gossips is upon it, and the problem is not only of the conscience but of the soul. This vast and difficult theme haunts its Catholic-convert playwright without for a moment ever easing his heart. Blinkered Catholicism and clear-eyed rationalism he alike denounces; indeed, beyond a blindly clutched and tormenting faith, Greene's spiritual cupboard seems bare. His well-meaning priest remarks that he has never read Paradise Lost--whose author also, as it happens, tried to "justify the ways of God to men." Certainly Greene's priest cannot justify them; he can only insist that they are somehow just. Greene's Jansenist mind--again in Milton's words--"can make a Hell of Heaven"; his stricken world suggests his fellow Catholic Francis Thompson's:

For we are born in other's pain, And perish in our own.

But it is not the play's forbidding tone or gloomy subject matter that makes it, after an impressive first half, so palpably decline. It is, rather, its compulsion to prolong the agony without knowing how to dramatize it. The fine craftsman and melodramatist who wrote Brighton Rock and The Power and the Glory, the novelist who much more deftly approached the theme of The Living Room in The Heart of the Matter, has, in his first play, allowed his anxious emotions to overwhelm him. The Living Room too much batters its theme before the suicide, and again for a whole scene after it. Nor is the production very helpful. Walter Fitzgerald and Michael Goodliffe are good as the priest and the psychologist, but Greene's cold overwroughtness is played up rather than down; and Barbara Bel Geddes. though a charming actress, lacks the right inner simplicity and bewilderment for the heroine.

But however excessive and overspecial the play may be in clawing its way toward the good life, a fair part of it has urgency and distinction. Its black-bordered script dignifies a Broadway overfond of greeting cards -- a Broadway that itself recoils from rooms in which anyone has died.

Wedding Breakfast (by Theodore Reeves) treats the romances of two Jewish sisters who share a Manhattan flat. Ruth is a salesgirl engaged to a bookkeeper: the couple is patiently building toward marriage with a joint bank account, and they talk in comic cliches. Stella, the other sister (Lee Grant), has risen somewhat snootily above her background: a college graduate with a magazine job, she was engaged to a doctor who has just married someone else. She is down in the mouth when she meets the bookkeeper's bright cousin Ralph (Anthony Franciosa), who sells hardware in Buffalo. Ralph falls for her, rushes her, wants to marry her. She loves him, but the intellectual snob (rather than the realist) in her resists Buffalo and hardware. When she begs Ralph to study for a profession, he flares up and walks out on her. When she confesses her mistake, he walks out on her a second time; but when the curtain falls, he is briskly walking back.

Playwright Reeves gets just serious enough in Wedding Breakfast to make things ring false. Though his double story in one sense shrieks its contrasts in values, he never really probes or assesses them, for one thing because both his heroines are the next thing to caricatures. But beyond that, Stella's story emerges as merely rigged up, as movie romance pretending to be a problem play, as Boy Meets Girl striking the attitudes of Character Is Fate. Even as romance, it is needlessly shabby: by the time a guy walks out on a girl twice, the playwright, at least, should know his own mind.

By comparison, Ruth's story--helped by winning performances from Virginia Vincent and Harvey Lembeck--is entertaining, though at an inch-above-comic-strip level. It suggests that when Playwright Reeves abandons pretenses and writes to please in a straight popular-comedy vein, he may very well prove pleasing.

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