New Plays in Manhattan

The Ponder Heart (adapted from Eudora Welty's story by Joseph Fields and Jerome Chodorov) puts all its slightly addled eggs in one basket--the basket of charm. Since they are really all Easter eggs to begin with, the thing works out very well. The whole Southern small-town tale of a lovable, eccentric ne'er-do-ill put on trial for murder has a light pastel daffiness about it, a way of making life look delightfully woozy through wrong-prescription rose-colored glasses.

Rich, bighearted, wackish Uncle Daniel Ponder has. among other benefactions, married a pretty little birdbrain (Sarah Marshall) and brought her--with her love of household gadgets--to a house without electricity, where she dies, at length, of fright during a thunderstorm. Prodded by an ambitious lawyer, her back-country kin charge Uncle Daniel with murdering her. The trial--of a modern-day Uncle Toby--calls to mind the trials in Pickwick and Alice in Wonderland. With cousins on the jury, kids overrunning the witness box, refreshments being served, Uncle Daniel first disappearing and then hiring the prosecution lawyer to handle the defense as well, it not so much travesties court trials as stands them squarely, and often hilariously, on their heads.

A slight tale, the play retains a good deal of Eudora Welty's delicate tailoring. It can be as chatty and dawdling as a rural postman. But as against the flails and wind machines that keep most Broadway comedies in motion, The Ponder Heart catches a fresh and genuine creative breeze. For the most part, too, it moves along without having to wear either the pretty-pretty ballet slippers of fantasy or the hobnailed boots of farce. In a good production, David Wayne's Uncle Daniel is outstanding: he plays the part, not with small studio strokes, but with a fine, freewheeling manner and a whole-grained physical sense of the man.

Someone Waiting (by Emlyn Williams) starts off with an English youth being hanged for the murder of a Swedish girl. Convinced that someone else is guilty, the youth's father gets a job, under an alias, in the household where the murder took place. In next to no time he has discovered the true murderer and worked out a proper revenge, but he is an unconscionable time pulling it off.

It's not that papa's revenge plot isn't clever; it's that Playwright Williams is so much cleverer throwing monkey wrenches into it. What with the wrong person turning up at the right moment, or the right person at the wrong one, or somebody showing funk or something important disappearing, there is endless gang-aft-agleying, and Someone Waiting seems more an obstacle race than a thrill er. Never believable, in time it becomes something of a bore, and though Leo G. Carroll plays the father with his usual deftness, it is on the audience that he really seems to be taking revenge.

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