New Play in Manhattan

A Majority of One (by Leonard Spigelgass). Problem: Can a plump Jewish widow (Gertrude Berg) from Brooklyn find enduring happiness with a rich Buddhist-Shintoist Japanese textile tycoon (Sir Cedric Hardwicke)?

Romance flowers for Mr. Asano and Mrs. Jacoby on board ship for Japan. A grieving widower, he has lost a daughter at Hiroshima; she, a son fighting the Japanese. What seems to make Mrs. Jacoby irresistible to Mr. Asano is that she keeps dropping magazines and mothers his cold with Smith Bros, cough drops. The couple soon let woebegones be woebegones, but Mrs. Jacoby's daughter and diplomat son-in-law plant cacti in the path of true love. Only at play's end is Mrs. Jacoby set to make "kosher sukiyaki" her dish of life.

Majority might be subtitled Halfway Around the World with Molly Goldberg (radio and TV Actress Berg's 29-year-long other life). She is the past mistress of the eloquent shrug, the rising inflection, the beautifully timed thrusting palm--up, down and out--the gently jabbing elbow ("So--it's settled?").

Since the Japanese have fewer jokes than the Jews in Playwright Spigelgass's accounting, Sir Cedric's poker-spined Mr. Asano is doubly inscrutable. He cuts the sweet wine of Actress Berg's sentimentalities by being sec, sec, sec.

Majority's skillful, amiable performers almost camouflage its sociological pretensions. What Majority wants to be is an adult East-meets-Western. What it is is a middle-aged Abie's Irish Rose, and it may turn out to be almost as successful.

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