The Theater: New Plays in Manhattan, Dec. 31, 1956

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Speaking of Murder (by Audrey and William Roos) will raise no goose-pimples or chill no blood, but it has some incidental virtues. It concerns an English blonde who, during a lengthy visit in Connecticut, has done in the wife of the house from a desire to marry the husband. But the husband has married a movie star instead, and the undiscouraged blonde is now ready to have a go at the second wife by suffocating her in a built-in vault in the library.

Although British Actress Brenda de Banzie plays the villainess with a properly cold, glassy and unruffled air, Speaking of Murder never really pays off as a scare piece. Beyond making no attempt at mystery, it offers nothing authentic in terms of shudders, nothing urgent in the way of suspense. It has the leisureliness and even the longueurs of a conversation piece, but in places some of the rewards. It is precisely when Actress de Banzie and a hard-drinking, hard-bargaining Estelle Winwood—who is blackmailing her—are speaking of murder that Speaking of Murder comes most happily to life. With her high-styled eeriness, her split-second vagueness, Actress Winwood could impose a sense of drawing-room comedy on a Laundromat, and does it all the better in a library. Though not a thriller, Speaking of Murder, as Broadway's only example of the type, should provide relief to those who crave a thriller until an actual thriller comes along.

Uncle Willie (by Julie Berns and Irving Elman) is Comedian Menasha Skulnik, long a favorite with Yiddish-speaking audiences and lately also on Broadway (The Fifth Season, The Flowering Peach). In Uncle Willie his extraordinary appeal does what it can to offset a miserably sleazy play. Cast as a turn-of-the-century do-gooder who deals in everything from pins to cemetery lots, he marries off immigrant cousins, assumes family mortgages and is good to little children. But above all he gradually converts a feuding two-family house, half Irish and half Jewish, into a bower of sweetness and light (a Christmas tree shining in one window, Hanukkah candles in another).

The sorriest aspect of Uncle Willie is not that its story makes Abie's Irish Rose seem positively avantgarde; it is not even its stale and stupid quips, but rather its greasy benevolence. Fairly often, to be sure. Actor Skulnik shakes himself free from it: with a demonstration of how to walk so that shoes will not wear out, with a tale of how each month his landlord pays him rent, with a mere shrug or grunt or monosyllable, he can be a delight. But oftener he struggles, like a boxer, to outpoint his material, or like a magician, to make it vanish; and oftenest, he is mowed down by it. The evening is as unhappy a mixture as an omelet would be made with one new-laid and one quite elderly egg.