The Theater: New Plays in Manhattan, Jan. 30, 1950

(3 of 3)

Seldom really human but everywhere humane, The Enchanted shimmers with a fine Gallic playfulness. It improvises a quick, ingenious answer for everything, doubtless as a way of saying that there is no certain answer for anything, and that the nearest thing to release from care is a fantasy by Giraudoux. The obvious theater qualities which The Enchanted lacks are richly offset by the rare ones it has. It is rather a shame that the production has just the earthiness needed by the play, the play just the airiness needed by the production. Adapter Valency's version is good and George S. Kaufman's staging far from bad. Leueen MacGrath is charming as the girl, but too monotonous; Wesley Addy is engaging as the suitor, but too stiff. Only Francis Poulenc's music catches the proper note of magic.

The Man (by Mel Dinelli; produced by Kermit Bloomgarden) is young and very dangerous—a paranoiac with a persecution mania who comes to do a day's cleaning for a kindly, middle-aged widow. At first he cleans a little and complains a little. Then he slowly starts manifesting symptoms of mental disorder, conveying suggestions of physical violence. All the while he is also locking doors until the terrified housewife is completely his prisoner. The end is still some way off, but sufficiently gruesome when it comes.

Dorothy Gish and Don Hanmer handle their frightened and frightening roles, their near-hysterical relationship, with decided skill; in fact, their performances are far better than the play. Theatrically, The Man is too low for a hawk and too high for a buzzard: it lacks the proper seriousness of a clinical study, the proper tingle of a thriller. It is not merely that the piece is too slow-moving. The Man depresses instead of exhilarates, sets its audience longing for good wholesome maniacs and fine fancy killers.

Good melodrama, like good farce, has its nonrealistic rules; it lowers actuality to heighten effect. The Man violates the rules. Once criminality is portrayed as a kind of malignant disease, it is hardly better than cancer as a theme for entertainment.