The Great Sebastians

The Great Sebastians, the latest starring vehicle for Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne, is a theatrical halfbreed described by its authors as "a melodramatic comedy." There is nothing intrinsically bad about such a combination, but Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse give the impression that they really wanted to write either a melodrama or a comedy, but that they are uncertain about how to bring the union about. As a result, their play is neither very funny nor very exciting.

The drama suffers from the weakness common to many melodramas--a highly illogical plot. Set in Prague during the winter of 1948, it relates the adventures of a team of music hall mind readers caught in the power struggle between the tottering democratic government and the new Communist regime. This situation, of course, gives Lindsay and Crouse a chance to create not only one villain, but a whole party of them. The mass-produced horde of party members, however, is such a blustering, inefficient and dull lot that their success in taking over Czechoslovakia seems more the result of chance than of design. The authors, though, are not particularly concerned with logic. They prefer merely to laugh at the Communists.

Aside from the consideration that Communism is a somewhat macabre subject for humor, The Great Sebastians has other grave faults as a comedy. Many of the jokes get such an elaborate buildup that the audience can anticipate them minutes beforehand. Most of the others are inevitable. The whole first act, moreover, has almost no funny lines at all, either good or bad.

Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne, for whom the play was created, try very hard to bring the inert bulk of the comedy to life. They assume foreign accents--he, something that sounds like German and is supposed to be Czech; she, cockney--they hurry about the stage a if they were really not more than sixty years old, and they argue about what code to use in their mind reading act as thought the subject held great interest. But, in the end, the Lunts too lose out to mediocre writing. The backstage life of vaudeville performers has so often been the subject of comedies that music hall actors are almost as stereotyped as movie cowboys by now. Involving the mind readers in a melodramatic plot fails to make them seem original.

Despite all of its faults, The Great Sebastians might still be made into an amusing comedy if Lindsay and Crouse were to revise it extensively, especially in the first act, so as to place more emphasis on humor and less on melodrama. Past experience seems to indicate that any play starring the Lunts has a chance to become a hit. The authors should not be content, however, to let their stars reputations draw the crowds.