New Play in Manhattan

The Rivalry (by Norman Corwin) recreates the fateful Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858. Douglas won the contest, in that he was re-elected Senator from Illinois, but the debates helped send Lincoln on to the presidency. In the main, Lincoln and Douglas argued three issues: 1) the extension of slavery, 2) the status of the Negro, 3) the right of the states to regulate the Negro's status. Basically, the debate of states' rights v. human rights is still passionately going on.

The difficulty with ex-Radio Writer Corwin's play is that the drama is in the issues and only fitfully on the stage. While the theater thrives on speech, it tends to wither on a constant diet of speeches. But if The Rivalry is necessarily talky, it is rarely small-talky. And Playwright Corwin could scarcely have picked better vocal foils or more dramatic look-unlikes than Richard Boone's Lincoln and Martin Gabel's Douglas.

Stocky, dynamic Martin Gabel is every half-inch "the Little Giant." His voice is a minefield of riches--the silver of persuasion, the gold of assurance, the hard diamond of logic, and sometimes the brass of sheer arrogance. Tall, gangling TV Star (Medic; Have Gun, Will Travel) Richard Boone brings to his Lincoln the homely gravity of the Mathew Brady photographs. His drawling voice begins like a modest rivulet picking its way over pebbles of country wit and wisdom, then swiftens into a stream of social inquiry and protest, and finally cascades in a thundering waterfall of conscience aroused: "A vast portion of the American people do not look upon slavery as a very little thing. They look upon it as a vast moral evil."

Too static to suggest history in the making, The Rivalry is fraught with tragic history in the offing--the Civil War. Its great protagonists seem a little like daguerreotypes of themselves, but the issue of right and wrong, which they debated, never fades.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.