The Theater: New Plays in Manhattan, Oct. 25, 1954

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The Tender Trap (by Max Shulman and Robert Paul Smith) is the usual trap set for bachelors—with the usual outcome.

Thirty-five-year-old Charlie Reader is not just the usual bachelor, however; he is part of what the authors portray as a special Manhattan breed—men besieged in their own apartments by an endless stream of attractive, obliging, gift-bearing women who are also more than happy to cook or clean house for monsieur. In the face of such good fortune, Charlie (well-played by Ronny Graham) has not the slightest desire to marry.

To complicate matters, Charlie's married pal from back home (Robert Preston) arrives in New York on business, and is pretty envious of Charlie's lot, but even more disapproving. He so sprays the atmosphere with the idea of matrimony that Charlie becomes engaged to two girls at once; a little later Boy loses Girls; thereafter, the big question of the evening is which one will he regain.

The play gets some amusement out of its gaudy claim that virtually any Manhattan bachelor who bathes regularly and has a steady job can lead the life of Don Juan just by answering the doorbell. The play is also rather amusingly penetrated with the idea that to all married men and single women the bachelor state—quite irrespective of a bachelor's habits—is thoroughly shocking. On the pleasant side, too, are more attractive girls—Kim Hunter, Janet Riley, Julia Meade and Parker McCormick—than turn up in many a musical.

But the play is unsatisfying; it lacks the right touch and tone. Its setup calls for something cool, smooth, quietly disdainful; far too often it is given something Broadwayish and breezy—stretches in which grown-men exchange banter about sex and a scene of disheveled, morning-after, mail-order farce. There is too palpable an air of We Aim To Please about it, and of aiming to please the very far from fussy.

Fragile Fox (by Norman Brooks) is a competent, routine thriller about World War II. It tells, in the italics of melodrama, of a company—commanded by a craven, drunken, swaggering captain—that is suddenly thrown into the Battle of the Bulge. Loathed by his men, the captain gets by with his ambition-ridden colonel because he is the son of an influential political boss in the colonel's home state. To the rumble of tanks and the rat-tat-tat of gunfire, the gutless captain wobbles, crosses up his men, plots to run out on the job, and is finally shot by his most levelheaded subordinate.

Fragile Fox bangs through three acts, tossing at the audience a large variety of theatrical explosives. Blood is shed, broken bones are set, orders are defied, prisoners are shot, characters swear and curse, reel forward and roll backward. The characters themselves range from the comic to the psychopathic, the believable to the incredible; the incidents sometimes recall the war, rather oftener recall other war plays.