Film and Radio Guide (Oct 1945-Jun 1946)

12 FILM AND RADIO GUIDE Volume XII, No. 3 THE PLAY'S THE THING Br FLORA RHETA SCHREIBER EDITOR'S NOTE We have received numerous requests to let a drama expert guide the theatre-going of our readers. Successful stage plays often become the literary sources of photoplays and radio plays. To appreciate films and iddio programs, it is therefore desirable to see the best current plays — either in New York or in key towns when these plays are roadshown throughout the country. Because of the interrelation of stage, screen, and radio, we present here the beginning of a drama department in the GUIDE. Floia Rheta Schreiber, a member of the speech department at Brooklyn College, was for four years drama critic of “The Players Magazine.” She is a contributor to a wide range of magazines, including such scholarly journals as “Poet Lore” and “The Quarterly Journal of Speech” and such popular magazines as “Collier’s” and “Mademoiselle.” Miss Schreiber has published critical articles on radio in the New York Times and has been a notable contributor of radio articles to this GUIDE. Her article on “The Battle of Soap Opera” has been reprinted and widely circulated. Miss Schreiber received her A.M. degree in drama at Columbia University. She won the Cornelia Otis Skinner Scholar-hip of the Drama League of America. This took her to the University of London, where she studied with Elsie Fogarty and E. Martin Browne at the Central School of Speech Training and Dranratic Art. Miss Schreiber is also an alumna of the N.Y.U. Summer Radio Workshop. Teachers and students of drama will find Miss Schreiber’s analyses of current plays not only enjoyable, but useful in building critical vocabularies. — W. L. "YOU TOUCHED ME" The theater’s n e \v whitehaired boy is Tennessee Williams, whose The Glass Menagerie won him the Critics’ Circle prize and also the Sidney Howard Memorial Prize. Mr. Williams’s second play, in collaboration with Donald Windham and Edmund Gwenn as the old toper, in Tennessee WiKioms's new play, "You Touched Me," is just plain wonderful, says Miss Schreiber. (Sketch by Lilly Rossi) with the shade of D. H. Lawrence, is Yo// Touched Me, presented by Guthrie McClintic in association with Lee Shubert. And now for a dash of heresy. I like You Touched Me better than The Glass Menagerie. Although The Glass Menagerie is better wrought and sharper in its over-all effect, it often depends on hokum to achieve its ends. And its style is frequently pretentious. There is, on the other hand, in the newer play literateness sans pretension, genuine humor, natural effervescence, and dialogue which is earthy, salty, and to the point. The point of the play, a point that the crusading Lawrence made again and again, is that women, in this case English women, obsessed with self-righteousness a n d self-martyrdom. destroy whomever their lives touch. It is the same point that Philip Wylie makes in A Generation of Vipers, in which he shouts down the American matriarchy. The self-righteous lady in the case is a spinster with a dream of marrying a parson described as “an ecclesiastical capon.” Meantime, however, though she is living on her brother’s income, she rules his house, dictates to his daughter, whom she has turned into a lonely, fragile recluse, and keeps her brother perpetually drunk by making his conscious life dismally neuter. There is dynamite let loose in the house when the brother’s adopted son returns home on furlough and falls in love with the niece. It is this love, tentative, frightened, uncertain how to proceed, that fires the father to declare independence. The father had once been a skipper, but, having foundered his ship, was deprived of his skipper’s certificate. Consigned to the shore — boredom for him — he has become a Rabelaisian character. Sharp, erotic images fly from his tongue as he goads his pink-tea daughter into defying her aunt and into facing love. Catherine Willard, who last season gave a commanding performance in The Deep Mrs. Sykes, is terrifying as the spinster. Occasionally her performance verges on caricature, but don’t caricature and nightmare merge somewhere in the realm of fear? Montgomery Clift, last season seen in The Searching Wind, underplays the part of the adopted boy. Marianne Stewart is the baffled ingenue. Till the end hers is an anemic role, and