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∙ COMEDIES: Elaine May (TIME, Sept. 26, 1960) has finally finished her long-fermented play. If it contains her own wild and uncommon brilliance, it will be superb. Called A Matter of Position, it is vaguely described as a protest against society. The star is her comic partner, Mike Nichols (Oct. 25). S. N. Behrman's Lord Pengo (Nov. 11) is an adaptation of his biography of Art Dealer Joseph Duveen, played by Charles Boyer. Anita Loos (Gentlemen Prefer Blondes} has been tinkling with a French play about the wedding night of Henry VIII and Anne of Cleves. Sidestepping Ladies Prefer Beards, she kept the French title, The King's Mare (January). The Beauty Part, S. J. Perelman's mad satire on culture-crazed Americans, is finally moving toward Broadway (Dec. 26) after trying out at Pennsylvania's Bucks County Playhouse in the summer of 1961. Opposite Carroll (Baby Doll) Baker, Van Johnson will play an actor who is also a LIFE photographer in Garson Kanin's Come On Strong (Oct. 4).
∙ DRAMAS: Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is the what-big-fears-you-have title of Edward Albee's first full-length play, dealing with a marriage problem (Oct. 13). Author of The Zoo Story, The American Dream, and The Death of Bessie Smith, Albee is the most talked-about young American playwright. The most promising young American playwright is probably Jack Richardson (The Prodigal, Gallows Humor), whose new play Lorenzo will star Alfred Drake in the story of a roving actor who finds himself involved in a blood feud between two towns and discovers that he cannot remain morally uncommitted (February). Novelist C. P.
Snow's The Affair, which had a good run last season as adapted for the London stage by Ronald Millar, now comes to New York (Sept. 20). How Much? is Lillian Hellman's new play, an adaptation of a novel about an old woman whose family is energetically trying to ship her off to a nursing home forever (February).
Everybody in Hollywood will soon be claiming that he is this or that character in Banderol, since the play centers around a studio production boss and was written by Dore Schary, ex-production boss at M-G-M (Oct. 9). Anthony Quinn and Margaret Leighton star in an adaptation of François Billetdoux's Tchin-Tchin (the word equals hello or goodbye, like ciao in Italian), a tale about lovers who meet as a result of a love affair between his wife and her husband (Oct. 18) A limited-run production of Sheridan's The School for Scandal opens on Broadway Jan. 21, starring Sir Ralph Richardson and Sir John Gielgud, who will also direct. Sidney Kingsley's first play in eight years is called Night Life (Oct. 23). It takes place in a key club, has 28 people onstage throughout, and is written in what Kingsley calls "a free and new use of verbal imagery and a new use of the stream-of-consciousness technique."