New Play in Manhattan

The Grass Harp (by Truman Capote) gives forth, for a time, a tremulous, delicate music, catching in a special world of its own some of the deep longings of the real world. But the music falters: in dramatizing his novel, Capote has told a stagier story, and brought in more themes than he can orchestrate or develop.

Verena Talbo has always tyrannized her sister Dolly (finely played by Mildred Natwick). But when she tries to cheat her as well, Dolly flees—with a young boy cousin and a tart-tongued servant (well played by Georgia Burke)—to a tree house in a wood. It is not only a revolt against ugly materialism, but an escape from reality. The trio are joined in their tree by a judge; and the quartet sits about, lonely and lost, wishing and dreaming aloud. After some dime-novel hocus-pocus breaks in on their dream world, Dolly goes home to face reality, and her realistic sister Verena is humbled into seeking love.

Capote knows how to capture the universal in the eccentric; and his earlier scenes have a humorous shimmer and elan, as of a story that will move skippingly toward its secret. But the play thereafter cannot evoke its meaning through its mood, or even sustain its mood. It becomes a half-farcical, half-melodramatic vaudeville, and its people finally go home less changed themselves than as though changes of character awaited them there. There is less a failure of logic than of magic, which is the more pronounced since the production—in Virgil Thomson's atmospheric music and Cecil Beaton's almost oppressively charming sets—so much stresses the fairy-tale note.