New Play in Manhattan

The Grand Prize (by Ronald Alexander) is a modern-style romantic comedy about a bachelor boss and his young secretary. That is to say, it is never for a moment soppily romantic: against a sophisticated Manhattan background, with flecks of satiric nonsense in the air, the parties concerned keep sex at fingernail's distance in the process of arriving at marriage. There is also a modern-style fillip to the plot: by way of a TV program, the secretary becomes her boss's boss for a day--and starts him off mixing the drinks, cleaning the apartment and doing the laundry.

But less vital than how she plays boss for a day is how she does so for the ensuing two nights. Hence for the next two acts it is Playwright Alexander's difficult job to make nothing much happen, but a good deal seem to. A neighborly and beslacked predatory platinum blonde wanders in and out; so does the heroine's repressed--and clearly replaceable--fiance: hero and heroine (John Newland and June Lockhart) take turns batting and fielding. And the repressed fiance (delightfully played by Tom Poston) is twice gorgeously tight.

These two drunk scenes are one reason--June Lockhart is another--why The Grand Prize ranks among the season's pleasanter also-rans. Playwright Alexander has a real gift for a funny line, though no gift whatever for hewing to it. Writing amiable nonsense, he can doubtless be pardoned for never sufficiently thickening his plot; his sin is how sadly he waters his prattle. He permits far too much second-rate--and secondhand--jesting; he should trade in his rubber stamp for a pruning knife. But The Grand Prize merits the classic praise the curate gave his egg: parts of it are very good.

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