The Prescott Proposals

Lindsay and Crouse's new play about high deeds in the U.N. is a pretty strong argument for permitting bars in theatres. Though the authentic setting, with elegant committee room and scurrying plenipotentiaries, is admirable, the play conveys with appalling faithfulness the tedium of the average U.N. session. The opening scene promises a melodrama dressed in the intriguing cutaway of international incident. Once the curtain has fallen, however, on the unique spectacle of the French and British U.N. delegates sneaking a corpse out of the U.S. delegate's apartment, the play rolls on like a tumbrel through scenes which seem to bore even the actors. Until the final scene's return to the plane of melodrama, the pace collapses completely. Without incisiveness, wit, or much relevance to the plot, the conversation rambles from the Korean War to freedom of the press to the merits of a Brahms piano concerto.

It is remarkable that the authors should have fashioned a dreary evening out of such potentially interesting material. In the U.N. they have an original setting for a play, in the delegates they have characters expressive of national as well as personal viewpoints, and in the East-West deadlock, they have an inherently dramatic situation.

Only occasionally, however, does The Prescott Proposals achieve any effect with these elements. The explanation lies in the authors' failure to make the committee scenes absorbing as theatre. In the first and last scenes, the international flavor of the play serves, as it should, to heighten the interest of the plot. The plot retreats, however, in the U.N. scenes and the play depends solely and vainly on the dramatic originality of a U.N. committee session on stage to retain the attention of the audience. While there is certainly an essential interest in this setting, in the gathering of nations around a conference table, in the obstructionism of the Russian Delegate and the neutrality of the Delegate from Pakistan, the authors have not translated this interest into dramatic terms. The committee scenes are graphic as a documentary, but very dull theatre.

Contributing to the tedium of The Prescott Proposals are other weaknesses. It is, for example, rather difficult to accept Mrs. Prescott's proposals, that the United Nations examine and try to extend areas of agreement, rather than concentrate on areas of disagreement, as holding out promise for "the saving of Western Civilization." Yet only by seeing the proposals as immensely significant, can the audience be very excited by the threatened ruin of the plan when the Czech U.N. Delegate and former lover of Mrs. Prescott inconsiderately drops dead in her bedroom. Nor without accepting the importance of the proposals, can the audience find credible the willingness of Mrs. Prescott's fellow delegates to remove the body and conceal the truth. The last scene of the play, however, betrays even those in the audience who have been suitably impressed by the proposals, since it wholly shifts the emphasis of the drama from the threat to the proposals to the threat to Mrs. Prescott's reputation, solely to make the conscience pangs of the Russian Delegate believable.

Slightly obscuring the weakness of the play is the general competence of the cast. Felix Aylmer is a restrained and amiable British Delegate, and Ben Astar capitalizes on a remarkable resemblance to Malenkov in a convincing, and not wholly unsympathetic portrayal of the Russian Delegate. As Mrs. Prescott, Katherine Cornell is a little hearty in her portrayal of the brilliant career-woman, but she clutches at furniture with appropriate intensity in her distraught moments.