New Plays on Broadway

The official 1960-61 season skidded twice in the home stretch:

A Call on Kuprin (by Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee; based on Maurice Edelman's novel) tells of an American journalist (Jeffrey Lynn) who, while vacationing in Moscow, seeks out his former Ohio astronomy professor (George Voskovec), now the greatest of Soviet scientists. What begins as a mere reunion turns, at the behest of the U.S. embassy, into an appeal to Scientist Kuprin to escape to America. What begins as an appeal turns, through the vigilance of the U.S.S.R., into some brisk spy-and-counterspy hanky-panky. At the end Kuprin, caught out, swears to stay permanently in the U.S.S.R. in exchange for letting the American and his new Soviet sweetheart--who is Kuprin's cousin--get away.

The trouble with A Call on Kuprin is not that it is one more lively routine thriller, but that it is that for only a fraction of the evening. The rest of the time it is a variety of other routine things--routine Intourist comedy, routine U.S.S.R. satire, routine romance, routine sentiment. The authors have fitted their occasional thoughtfulness and sense of balance inside a framework of hackwork so that the play, in the end, has no more sustained topical value than theatrical impact.

Mandingo (by Jack Kirkland; based on Kyle Onstott's novel) makes mere plot seem an anachronism, it has so much erupting at such lurid levels, so much more belching forth when nothing more seems possible. Except for its blatant treatment of sex, Mandingo would itself seem an anachronism, written in 1832 as well as taking place then. The scene is an Alabama plantation, with Franchot Tone as an aging, tippling, crotchety slave breeder and seller. Among his slaves are drunkards, onetime bedmates, "rheumatiz boys," and three Mandingos (so named for their ancestral African tribe), who to preserve their pure blood must practice incest. Among his family are a son who loathes his wife and lives openly with a slave girl, and a lewd, liquored-up daughter-in-law (Brooke Hayward) who, from having been her "brother's whore," becomes a Mandingo youth's relentless seducer. Among the play's activities are brutal floggings, slaves who maul and kill one another while their masters bet on them, the daughter-in-law's horsewhipping her pregnant rival to death, and the planter's murdering first his son and then the boy's Mandingo mistress.

Conceivably, over this orgy of miscegenation, incest, torture and carnage can be draped some kind of indictment or protest. But in invading the Alabama of Mandingo, the Kirkland who portrayed the Georgia of Tobacco Road seems, steadily and shamelessly, to purvey sensationalism. The result may not be boring, but it is everywhere bad and, in more than one place, backfiringly ludicrous.

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