New Play in Manhattan

Mrs. Patterson (by Charles Sebree and Greer Johnson) chronicles the tangled real life and fragrant dream life of adolescence. There is good reason for Teddy Hicks's flights from reality: a 15-year-old Negro girl whose father deserted her mother (well played by Ruth Attaway), Teddy lives in ramshackle poverty. Mischievous, sensitive, sharp-tongued, she yearns to be "a rich white woman" like her mother's employer, Mrs. Patterson. But mingled with her gaudy fantasies of tea parties in the Patterson set are episodes involving raffish Chicago folk and a certain "Mr. D." from Hell. At the end, the dreams are crushed out, and Teddy starts facing the realities she has run away from.

With strikingly individual Eartha Kitt--risen from blues-singing to stardom--playing Teddy in a darting, prickling style, Mrs. Patterson has more in its favor than a sympathetic theme and a sharp approach. Yet the play as a whole is curiously flat and eventually tedious. The fault springs from nothing genteel or unhumorous in treatment: the authors squarely face Teddy's conflicts long before she does. Nor need the play's want of real movement, its mere alternations between fact and fantasy, prove fatal. But lacking outward progression, Mrs. Patterson needs real leverage of words, real voltage of imagination; it needs moments that leave bright stains, that illuminate and transform. The contrasts it gets are emphatic without being poignant, the alchemy it practices is toward lead rather than gold. There is nothing discreditable about the play's failure; it shows no lack of courage, only of talent.

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