“Tea” Is Off-Beat Play

Let me take you now 'to a quite different play, "Tea and Sympathy," which promises to be in its own way as popular as "Wonderful Town."

"Tea and Sympathy" is an offbeat play and it is moving, genuine and affecting. I did not share the unreserved admiration for it that most of the New York critics seemed to feel.,

It is a play of a rather obvious theatrical substance and written by a young writer who is not well acquainted with the fatalities of overstatement His hero is a young boy in preparatory school who is suspected of homosexuality. He is not a homesexual and the real theme of this play is not homosexuality, but the persecution that society visits on anybody who deviates from the normal, such as the boys who prefer music to football.

Magnificeni

Deborah Kar is magnificent in the portrayal of a wife who decides to give herself to the young man to prove his manhood and reinstitute him in harmony with the world in which he is obliged to live.

I thought this play very dubious in its statements and impli cations and I felt that Elia K2zan's direction was old-fashioned ard too theatrical. With a story such as this you don't need pauses, stiff walks to the right or left and all the useless baggage of what is called direction.

You merely Leed to let the story of the play follow its course on an even keel and in a fluent way. I know this kind of talk rather technical and unimportant and I should not ordinarily use it about a play shown in Cleveland. But every actor and every director is aware of what I mean.

I put down "Tea and Sympathy" as a enormously interesting play, misdirected but not misbegotten, and with a couple of beautiful performances, one by Miss Kerr and the other by John Kerr.