The Member of the Wedding, Carson McCullers' dramatization of her novel, is unquestionably the first serious new play of any consequence to reach Broadway this season. It has a good many touching and rather difficult things to say; it often has a queer, fantastic wit, not unlike Saroyan's; occasionally it reaches something very close to poetry; and it is illuminated by a magnificent performance by Ethel Waters and two remarkably spirited ones by Julie Harris and a seven-year-old boy named Brandon De Wilde. In spite of all this, however, I'm afraid that the piece at the Empire isn't entirely satisfactory from a theatrical point of view. The principal trouble, I think, is that Mrs. McCullers has tried to transfer her book too literally to the stage; to crowd, that is, the whole mysterious desperation of adolescence into three acts, along with a fairly exhaustive discussion of the complicated theme of race relations in the South. The result is a curiously uneven work—sometimes funny, sometimes moving, but also, unfortunately, sometimes just a trifle incoherent and shapeless.

The heroine of The Member of the Wedding is a rather plain twelve-year-old girl who is known to an insensitive world as Frankie Addams, though she prefers to think of herself as F. Jasmine Addams, and she lives with her widowed father and their old Negro cook, Berenice Sadie Brown, who has one bright-blue glass eye, in a small town in Georgia. Frankie has a great deal on her mind (at twelve, for instance, she is five feet five and three-quarter inches tall and at the rate she's going she is gloomily certain that she'll hit a good ten feet by the time she's twenty-one), but the real root of her unhappiness is her terrible sense of being alone, separate from everybody else in the world, both children and adults. Primarily, this feeling is a symptom of her age, but as it happens she really hasn't much of a social life, since the slightly older girls in the neighborhood have banned her from their club, and her only companions are Berenice and a cousin some six years her junior, who is moderately silly even as little boys go. At this point, when Frankie's need to attach herself to something or somebody is almost unbearable, her brother drops in with his fiancée. They seem to her the two most beautiful people who ever lived, and she decides to join them on their honeymoon, which she vaguely pictures as a triumphal tour around the world, going on forever. Berenice, who has had a wide experience with matrimony, tries to explain that membership in weddings is customarily limited to two, but Frankie's dream of being part of something at last, especially something that promises to be not only strange and lovely but also infinitely removed from Georgia, is too strong for cynical arguments like that, and she goes ahead with her plans, which include the purchase of a red evening dress, cut right down to the waist in the back. In the end, of course, she is left behind, and though the bridal pair do their best to spare her feelings, for a time she is desolate, even to the point of attempting suicide. Sad as it is, this disillusionment has the effect of putting an end to Frankie's childhood, and in the last scene we find her reasonably adjusted to her surroundings, being, in fact, about to go for a ride on a moving van with a young football player and his girl.

Mrs. McCullers has a peculiar gift for creating characters immune to the usual rules of human behavior, and it is possible to accept the fact that Frankie can be an almost total biological ignoramus while living in a circle where practically nothing else is ever discussed, and while herself employing most of the popular terminology. She is not exactly a girl who will bear examination in retrospect, but in her presence I was bewitched by her and saw no reason at all to suppose that wedding bells and sex would have any vulgar association in her mind. Miss Harris may be overplaying this part a trifle from time to time, once to the extent of introducing a cartwheel into it, but on the whole I admired her performance and concur in the general opinion that she is one of the most talented young actresses around today.

The two other major figures in the play are also very fascinating, if not quite so original in design. Berenice was absolutely happy with her first husband, but he died and since then she has been trying to console herself with the "bits and pieces" of him that she has found in other men. She serves chiefly as a contrast to Frankie's inexperience and as her only refuge in her distress. This is obviously a role with disastrous possibilities, but the writing, except in one or two places, is free from bathos, and Miss Waters' interpretation is a miraculously balanced combination of rowdy humor and sorrowful understanding. The cousin, played by young De Wilde, struck me as one of the few completely believable little boys ever put on the stage, and I felt a strong sense of personal loss when Mrs. McCullers, for rather arbitrary reasons, decided to kill him off in her last act.

The racial subplot, which, as I say, seems to me only to confuse and diminish the play, however much it may have been an organic part of the novel, has to do with a young mulatto, Berenice's foster brother, who knifes a white man while under the influence of marijuana and subsequently hangs himself in jail. His abrupt and violent end, coinciding with the cousin's death from meningitis, provides The Member of the Wedding with a lively, if lugubrious, conclusion, but somehow it also introduces an element of contrived melodrama out of keeping with the delicate mood that has been so successfully sustained throughout most of the evening.

The cast, brilliantly directed by Harold Clurman, also includes William Hansen, Harry Bolden, Henry Scott, and James Holden. I can't remember a more engaging group of supporting players, and Lester Polakov's set, presumably representing a typical Georgia kitchen, would astonish Jeeter Lester with its neat and airy look.