New Plays on Broadway

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Five Finger Exercise (by Peter Shaffer) starts off with the look of one more mousy English country-house play, with the sound of one more reminiscent and easily resolvable tune. But it becomes increasingly cat-and-mousy, with a tune that introduces subtle dissonances, ominous themes, crashing chords. The Harrington family is slightly non-U and wholly nonunified. Father (Roland Culver) is a self-made furniture manufacturer, all the more defensively crass and philistine because of his contemptuously snobbish, culture-climbing wife (Jessica Tandy) and his contemptuous, muddled mamma's lap dog of a son (Brian Bedford).

Into their divided, miscomprehending midst, as tutor to a still cheery teen-age daughter, comes a quiet young German, hating the land of which his brutal Nazi father seems a symbol, and eager for a friendly English home. Discerning about the neurotic Harringtons, he--who has known real horror--tries to prevent the needless horror the family is inflicting on itself. But in sounding the alarm bell, he feeds the fire, and soon accusations and recriminations flare up everywhere.

Playwright Shaffer can write sharp dialogue that is also characterizing, can cunningly create atmosphere and tension. This, linked to a vivid production, makes for a generally good evening that at its best is engrossing. The play has its contrived moments and false notes, and the German--however well played by Michael Bryant--serves too many purposes to emerge entirely right. But in view of England's gulf between classes and generations and often evasive family tactics, there is more than a measure of truth in Shaffer's picture. And with John Gielgud eloquently directing a good cast in which the father and son are outstanding, there is a definite abundance of theater.

Jolly's Progress (by Lonnie Coleman) concerns a wild, scared, quick-witted young Alabama Negro housemaid who, having been seduced by her employer and sent packing by his wife, finds sanctuary with an enlightened writer. While the writer is playing Professor Higgins to the girl's Liza, the town assumes he is playing Don Juan. Preachers rail, hooded figures threaten, before a ladylike Jolly goes North for further schooling. Beyond some vivid touches by Eartha Kitt, the play has small merit. It is so gagged up with breezy situations, crude stereotypes and comic characters that the racial angle, which might have breathed chill realism upon Shavian comedy, seems merely employed for effect. What is not Pygmalion about the play is tatterdemalion.

Silent Night, Lonely Night (by Robert Anderson) tells of two people in a New England inn on Christmas Eve. Strangers in adjacent rooms--Barbara Bel Geddes has a son in a prep-school infirmary near by, Henry Fonda a wife in a mental sanitarium up the hill--they come together out of loneliness, are at first trivially autobiographical, then more and more confidingly so. They have a drink with newlyweds, look back on marriage that has come to grief, resist pity and show twinges of self-pity, talk of love and resist sex. The woman, it turns out, has an unfaithful husband; the man has a wife he played a part in driving insane. In the end after they have made love, she goes back to her husband and he has a flicker of hope for his wife.

The author of Tea and Sympathy has written a kind of Elegy in a Country Bedroom, an evening-long unburdening of troubled hearts and sluicing of wistful memories. Much of it is honestly evocative and well expressed. A sensitive Henry Fonda and an appealing Barbara Bel Geddes do well by it. But beyond suffering crucially as a play from all lack of movement, Silent Night suffers equally as a conversation piece from overstretching a mood. That bedeviler of the mood piece, monotony, more and more scatters his poppies. Valid feeling comes more and more to seem watered or sugared.

Undramatic though the play is, the final trouble lies less with subject matter than with form. Had Silent Night been not a full play but a longish one-acter, it might have had a special appeal. It could, just long and lyrically enough, have chronicled a meeting and sustained a mood--and with no tossed-in newlyweds, no shaky final scene. Unfortunately, as a one-acter it would not fit the Broadway scheme of things, though as a full-length play it scarcely fits it either.

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