The Theater: New Plays in Manhattan, Nov. 10, 1958

The Marriage-Go-Round (by Leslie Stevens) has three strings to its bow: Claudette Colbert, Charles Boyer and Julie Newmar. With their help, one of the season's crudest commodities may well become one of its most solid hits.

Actress Colbert and Actor Boyer play a happily married middle-aged couple—she a dean of women, he a professor of anthropology—in a small college town. At opposite ends of the stage they give cutey-cute lectures on marriage which, on a midstage merry-go-round-like set, they themselves help illustrate. As The Marriage-Go-Round's third or G-string, Actress Newmar plays an amply built Swedish blonde who. from out the whole world, has chosen Boyer to give her a child. Her body, she informs him, "is primed in readiness," nor is her use or adornment of it ever marred by reticence. While Colbert, who knows what's up, waits and wonders and attempts to act wise, Boyer first laughs off, then warns off, then fights off his Viking admirer, and then almost succumbs.

Of all plays, modern or ancient. The Marriage-Go-Round may well be the least given to digression. Here are sex and marriage, marriage and sex, with never a servant to interrupt, or a caller to intrude, or a child to compete; with not a moment's domestic small talk or campus chatter. So much single-mindedness, so many double meanings have a way—despite occasionally funny lines—of seeming both tedious and tawdry. Where The Marriage-Go-Round is not a Junoesque strip-tease on Actress Newmar's part, it becomes an attempted script-save on Colbert's and Boyer's. Their manner of saving it is to throw away as much of it as possible. What they give instead is an illustrated lecture—on the art of timing, of diversionary tactics, of seeming to fondle dialogue while carefully holding it at arm's length. Even they cannot too often succeed; and in any case there must, for two such delightful performers, be infinitely more profitable roles.

The Man in the Dog Suit (by Albert Beich and William H. Wright; based on Edwin Code's novel) originally wore it to a costume party. Normally a man with a mouse manner, he works in his wife's family bank and quails before the Babbitts and snobs and stuffed shirts in his wife's family. Then, all at once, he takes to wearing the dog suit as he chooses and begins to act out his daydreams. One time he bites a lady, another time a banker; he scandalizes the depositors, horrifies the in-laws he hates, disturbs the wife he loves. Suddenly the bank bids him choose: "The desk or the dog suit!"