New Play in Manhattan

Miss Isabel (by Michael Plant and Denis Webb) is Shirley Booth, but even that does not help much. With scarcely a sign of talent, the authors of Miss Isabel have tackled a stage subject that might make genius stumble. Their aging, white-haired heroine becomes mentally ill and imagines that she is a young girl and that her embittered, put-upon old-maid daughter is her mother. One act later, Miss Isobel imagines that she is a tiny child who keeps caterpillars in a shoe box.

The theater, with its blunt visual effects, is less suited to so ticklish a story than fiction would be, and the authors of Miss Isabel are not suited to it at all. After eying a grim but at least genuine theme--that the mother's pathos may complete the daughter's tragedy--they back quickly away from it to trade in sticky pathos for pathos' sake. With such facile props as a small boy, a weird Chinese lady and a blind young Scot, they work up a mild tearjerker seasoned with laughs. But they invoke no tears, and only occasionally, thanks to Shirley's skill, do they draw laughter. Their play is every bit as tedious as it is unpalatable.

In places Actress Booth proves a sort of show-within-a-show, or a rewarding actress without one. With a look, a gesture, an intonation, she can be remarkably eloquent; but in the end the play, and even the part, is too much for her. Having taken on Miss Isobel after the hardly less piffling The Desk Set, she should next time try something more than the audience's patience.

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