Tbe Playgoer

Skyscrapers, subways, slums and slicks, seven million people from the Bronx to Coney, that's the phenomenon people call New York City. It's a world within a nation, a monster cosmopolitanism which, like most great things, defies definition. Vinton Freedley, Jr. has written, and the Dramatic Club has produced a play about New York. They have not tried to define it, but they have, within the limits of stagecraft, tried to reproduce some of its many facets. To realize the ambitions ideal they set up for themselves, the Dramatic Club has used a cast of more than 150, a large production staff, and 26 scenes, a total effect which can only be described by college standards as colossal.

It would be unjust to say that this mountainous production has labored mightily and brought forth a mouse, but it certainly has brought forth no result comparable to its size, Weighted down its own tremendousness, they play loses its sense of movement, purpose, direction, and sprawls out into a series of isolated scenes. Even this impressionistic, kaleidoscopic technique might have created a unified effect had the production staff been able to set and maintain a snappy pace. But many of the scenes were punctuated with lengthy pauses, the sense of continuity sinking further and further into the background with each succeeding second of inactivity.

But out of the melee, individual efforts arose into the spotlight because of their sheer quality. Vinton Freedley, Jr.'s dialogue, when not under the Coward influence, packed punches a-plenty. His characters tended to be typed, good, bad, rich, poor, though sometimes they rise above it and become people. John Holabird's sets, especially Mona's apartment, bear all the earmarks of something bound for Broadway. The Newberry-Rollins music (there should have been more of it!) fitted in beautifully with the Profit dance effects, and the two combined produced some of the high sports in the show.

Honor roll of swell performances:- John Profit as the silent bum; Helen Schuman in assorted bit parts; Agnes Love, who had the best lines in the show and made the most of them; Hunt Hamill, the suave, cynical, polo-playing hero of a shop-girl's dreams; and finally Richard Whittemore, the death-watch announcer with an appetite.