CINEMA: Time Listings, Sep. 26, 1960

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Great Debates (NBC, CBS, ABC, 9:30 p.m.). The first of the much-heralded TV encounters between Candidates Nixon and Kennedy.

Jackpot Bowling (NBC, 10:30-11 p.m.). Milton Berle is host in a new program involving the best U.S. professional bowlers in alley-fighting competition for big-time pin money.

THEATER

On Broadway

New plays, like oysters, are in season, but there are some still amazingly fresh items from last year's bill of fare with which to contend: Toys in the Attic, Lillian Hellman's skillful exploration of the Sons and Lovers theme, stars Jason Robards Jr.; The Tenth Man mixes modern psychology and ancient rite in Playwright Paddy Chayefsky's tale about a Jewish girl possessed by an evil spirit; The Miracle Worker, with brilliant performances by Anne Bancroft and Patty Duke, dramatizes the brave, difficult relationship between blind and deaf-mute Helen Keller as a child and her teacher, Annie Sullivan; The Best Man, though superficial in characterization, provides a vivid theatrical look at campaigning politicians. Three musicals remain spicy and satisfying: West Side Story, Leonard Bernstein's brassy, big-city, 20th century Romeo and Juliet; Fiorello!, the nostalgic story of New York City's Little Flower; and Bye Bye Birdie, an enjoyable spoof of the rock-'n'-roll craze.

Off Broadway

At New York's City Center, brilliant Pantomimist Marcel Marceau is doing everything from minor impressions of a high-wire performer to a wordless enactment of Gogol's The Overcoat; at the Phoenix Theater, Tyrone Guthrie's production of H.M.S. Pinafore slaps salt freshness into Gilbert and Sullivan.

Half a dozen first-rate holdover shows reflect the steadily improving quality of the fare in off-Broadway playhouses: Little Mary Sunshine, a musical spoof of old-time operettas; A Country Scandal, an early Chekhov play produced professionally for the first time in the U.S.; The Balcony, Jean Genet's mordant and amusingly symbolic study of politics in a brothel; The Connection, a plotless, devastatingly naturalistic, jazz-counterpointed evening with a collection of junkies; Krapp's Last Tape, a one-actor one-acter by Samuel Beckett, throwing a man's youth into the face of his age, produced on a twin bill with The Zoo Story, in which two men from opposite ends of the social spectrum conduct a dialogue that ends in a curious twist of a switchblade.

BOOKS

Best Reading

The Politics of Upheaval, by Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. In the third volume (covering 1935-36) of his series, The Age of Roosevelt, as in its predecessors, the author sometimes confuses history with hagiography; but if the work is partisan, it is also sweepingly and spiritedly written.

The Black Book, by Lawrence Durrell. A glittering, impudent, outrageous novel, all murk and manifesto, written by the author of the Alexandria tetralogy when he was 24 and had just made the heady discovery that he was a very good writer.

All Fall Down, by James Leo Herlihy. A fresh, Salingering tale of a hooky-playing 14-year-old and his off beatnik parents, whose foundering world finds focus in another brother as wild as his name: Berry-berry.