Nights Before Christmas

Portrait of a Lady (adapted from Henry James's novel by William Archibald), which closed at week's end, was almost foredoomed to fail in the theater.

For stage purposes, James's famous novel uses too broad a canvas, possesses too subterranean a flow, treats of too complexly simple a heroine. And without the prose and insights that give it distinction in book form, Portrait comes off a waxwork.

In Portrait, as so often elsewhere, James dramatized the impact of Europe on a fresh, responsive American nature.

He contrasted 19th century American "innocence" with Old World decadence and guile. Assured, high-mettled Isabel Archer wants ardently to live without knowing too much about life. She rejects the safe and familiar, only to marry a corruptly overcultivated expatriate who wants only her money. The awakening is hideous; but having made her bed of spikes, Isabel sentences herself to lie in it.

Sliced paper-thin for the stage, and acted in an emotional treble by Cinemactress Jennifer Jones (making her Broadway debut), Isabel seemed largely pushed about by the plot. The whole play was Henry James glimpsed from a train window in the rain; only here or there emerged a recognizable face or voice.

What Every Woman Knows (by J. M.

Barrie) gave the theater public Helen Hayes--at popular prices--for Christmas.

Opening the City Center season, Barrie's classic displayed a rusty but apparently indestructible cleverness, a dusty but still perceptible appeal. If the play sometimes seems quaint, that is perhaps because every woman knows so much more than she did in 1908. But few playwrights today know half as much about smart box-office methods as Barrie did then. After 46 years, his sense of theater and shrewd manipulation of sentiment still pay off.

Such assets help, even more than the humor, in this success story of the wife-made man. They brighten up Barrie's essentially unattractive characters. Those hard bargainers and dull conversationalists, the Wylie brothers, are saved by their affection for Maggie. An egocentric John Shand is saved by a humorlessness that makes him funny. And Maggie herself, whose maiden name wasn't Wylie for nothing, becomes an actress' dream part through the love that inspires the wiles.

Playing that part once again, Helen Hayes once again scores. If she now and then turns almost as cute as Barrie himself, she is most of the time as deft and self-effacing as Maggie Shand.

Black-Eyed Susan (by A. B. Shiffrin) showed what can be achieved, with a little real effort, in the way of topnotch vulgarity. All about a young wife's seduction of a neurologist, it pawed and lipsmacked its way through a torrential downpour of double-entendres. The tone, here and there, was no worse than sniggering.

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