New Play in Manhattan

The Day the Money Stopped (by Maxwell Anderson and Brendan Gill; based on the Gill novel) deals with a classic stage theme: a fight over a will. It uses classic combatants: the disinherited black sheep and his self-righteous brother. As the glib playboy with a rusting charm (Richard Basehart) and the sententious prig with a rankling virtue (Kevin McCarthy) trade slurs--while their sister (Mildred Natwick) waves an olive branch --they lay siege to the holdings in the family vault via the skeletons in the family closet. Out, eventually, clatter illegitimacies and suicides and a crushed father image. And the disinherited playboy, at the end, has wangled twenty grand, only to spurn it.

The play uses a classic stage form, the brittle conversation piece. In terms of smart brushes and insulting banter, this has its good points; but seldom were a classic action and a classic method so mismated. 'Stage struggles over a will make for melodrama or serious drama, farce or sardonic comedy, for banged fists, shaking fingers or skinny claws--but not for the playfully brandished rapier. Fencing verbally, the brothers sometimes neatly pink each other, even achieve an occasional moral louche. But they use buttoned foils on synthetic flesh. Nor, in place of human drama, is there any real psychological probing or moral insight. The wastrel's behavior, at the end, for example, has no ironic force and is wholly out of character --words are his forte, not gestures.

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