The Theater: New Plays in Manhattan, Nov. 8, 1954

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The Traveling Lady (by Horton Foote) is a small-sized drama by a "promising" playwright (The Chase, The Trip to Bountiful) who continues to fumble. But it raises to stardom a very gifted young actress who continues to grow. Kim Stanley (The Chase, Picnic) plays a bewildered, hard-beset young mother, not very bright but full of courage, married to a no-good weakling just out of jail and soon heading back to it. She plays the part with force and feeling and an eloquently detailed sense of character, and it's a pity that she is stranded by the play as well as in it.

Whatever credit Horton Foote earns as a playwright not for being a hack, he tends to forfeit from not being a craftsman. Writing of small town Texans, he gropes among their crotchets and habits and heartaches, and at his best achieves touching moments about touching characters. But, in general, he has a certain sense of the blundering mischance of life without knowing how to project it. All too often, he writes muddled scenes involving muddled people.

In The Traveling Lady some of the people even play muddled roles—parts that have only the most peripheral value or semi-farcical character. They pass and repass, moreover, among lighting effects that involve the approach of dusk or onset of night, or sound effects of offstage dance music and distant trains. Such mood props can be valuable when they supplement the right storytelling and speech; but in The Traveling Lady they are often merely sentimental substitutes for them. There is no drive or fiber to the play, but rather a curious sense of wordiness without any gift for words.

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Actress Kim Stanley, 29, belongs to a growing school of young stage people (Marlon Brando, Julie Harris, Geraldine Page) whose particular brand of acting is laughingly called The Method. There is seldom any eye-rolling madness in this methodism: the actor does not tear a passion to tatters. Instead, he digests the role slowly, bit by bit, until he feels that he is truly the personality he is portraying.

Kim, a native of New Mexico, has been practicing her style since 1949, when she began studying at the Actors Studio with Broadway Directors Elia (A Streetcar Named Desire) Kazan and Lee (Men in White) Strasberg, both of whom worked with the old Group Theater and became two of the ablest craftsmen to influence the U.S. stage. Television jobs and a few good on-and off-Broadway roles helped Kim along. Finally, as the homely, dry-tongued adolescent sister in Picnic (TIME, March 2, 1953), she won both the New York Drama Critics' and Donaldson awards as the year's best supporting actress.

Married to Actor-Director Curt Conway, Actress Stanley has a three-year-old daughter and a year-old son, commutes 40 miles to her home in Centerport, L.I. Now a full-fledged Broadway star—her name was shifted to the top of the marquee and billboards after the opening-night notices—she insists: "I don't feel any different. I still want to spend as much time as I can with my children. They need me a great deal, at their age."