Although "Back to Methuselah" is an act of faith, it is not particularly exhilarating. Although it contains Bernard Shaw's unconquerable spirit, it does not have much of his personality.

When he wrote it in 1921, he took 90,000 words to tell the story of mankind from the Garden of Eden to some year so far in the future that neither he nor we can really imagine it. Being rash in 1922, the Theater Guild put on the whole of it in three successive weeks, astonishing Shaw, testing the durability of the subscribers.

Now Shaw is dead, the Theatre Guild is mature and Arnold Moss has reduced the 90,000 words to 30,000, which were spoken by a troupe of rational actors at the Ambassador last evening. Despite the magnificence of Shaw's conception of man's will to go on living, despite the grandeur of his dramatic project, "Back to Methuselah" seems disappointingly prosy. The thoughts fly up the words remain below.

The barbarism of World War I had depressed this prophet of the life force (impudently stated in "Man and Superman"), and possibly he wrote "Back to Methuselah" to buck up his own spirits. It shows Adam and Eve learning the glory of life in their enchanted garden. It declares that man can increase the length of his life by imagining it and willing it; for life responds to the spirit that man nourishes within himself. Shaw's thesis is that in the twentieth century man lives too briefly to learn how to live. Civilization will die unless man lives long enough to learn how to control it.

We are in no position today to be boorish about a man of faith who can think and dream in terms of immortality—who can foresee the time when life will consist of pure thought. As usual, Shaw has a few odds and ends of scientific fact on which to construct a religious edifice.

But the prophet is rarely a poet in "Back to Methuselah." Immersed in the labor of writing 90,000 words he has abandoned his familiar cap and bells. His spirit may be exalted; his spirits are a good deal lower than usual.

It seems to this theatre-goer that the performance seems disappointingly prosy. The thoughts fly up the words remain below.

The barbarism of World War I had depressed this prophet of the life force (imprudently stated in "Man and Superman"), and possibly he wrote "Back to Methuselah" to buck up his own spirits. It shows Adam and Eve learning the glory of life in their enchanted garden. It declares that man can increase the length of his life by imagining it and willing it; for life responds to the spirit that man nourishes within himself. Shaw's thesis is that in the twentieth century man lives too briefly to learn how to live. Civilization will die unless man lives long enough to learn how to control.

We are in no position today to be boorish about a man of faith who can think and dream in terms of immortality—who can foresee the time which life will consist of pure thought. As usual, Shaw has a few odds and ends of scientific fact on which to construct a religious edifice.

But the prophet is rarely a poet in "Back to Methuselah." Immersed in the labor of writing 90,000 words he has abandoned his familiar cap and bells. His spirit may be exalted; his spirits are a good deal lower than usual.

It seems to this theatergoer that the performance that Margaret Webster has staged is unhappily earthbound. Marvin Reiss' settings are not really imaginative, nor are Patricia Zipprodt's costumes.

Although the actors do well enough, they are on a fairly literal plane. Arthur Treacher is the only Shavian actor on the lot. As an Account-General in the year 2108 and an Elderly Gentleman in 3000, he gives his lines the droll inflections of a Shavian. Among the audacious declarations of the characters he finds the impudence of the author. In the last scene, Deirdre Owen expresses some of the same irrepressible irreverence as a girl freshly born form an immaculate egg. (At last Shaw found a nice way to escape the untidiness of sex.)

Able actors play the other parts—Faye Emerson, a handsome, alert actress, plays Eve and Eve's successors; Tyrone Power, handsome and earnest, plays Adam and a long line of Adams through the centuries. (You may be relieved to know that Adam and Eve are decorously garbed in the Garden of Eden. Don't believe all those sun-worshipers' statues you may have seen.) Richard Easton plays Cain, Valerie Bettis plays the Serpent, and Arnold Moss, in knickers, Norfolk jacket and white beard, plays George Bernard Shaw, father of the occasion.

If "Back to Methuselah" were a tract, their acting would be quite satisfactory. But it is a tract by a man of incomparable personal electricity. Even if it is Shaw a little off his literary form, it deserves acting that is mischievous and witty with a dash of iconoclasm running through it.

This "Back to Methuselah" is polite and earnest. Reducing it to the manageable length of a single evening has not lightened its spirits.

Lilith is the creative spirit who tore herself asunder to give birth to the human race, and at the end of the new evening at the Ambassador she decides to let it go on for a little while longer, possibly because she hasn't seen "Back to Methuselah."

I tell you, friends, there's just no point in going on. In the cutting that Arnold Moss has made of Bernard Shaw's nine hour play, he has cut it to two and a half, and I am not going to chide him for it's Mr. Shaw is engaged in a running argument with Adam.

Adam's contention, as it is presented to us by Tyrone Power in brown tights and quite a few fig leaves, is that the prospect of eternal life on earth is unendurable. Ergo, Adam invents death. (He also, with the co-operation of Faye Emerson in long blonde tresses and a considerable amount of cheesecloth, invents birth, so that the burden of keeping things going temporarily may be taken over by some one else.)

Shaw's contention is that Adam, together with all his embattled and diseased descendants, was being shortsighted in steadily reducing the number of years a man might contemplate, emulate and go to the theater. three hundred years seems a round figure to him times - let's say for the beast. Helping Mr. Power decide on the proper words for everything (the word "fool," however, comes instinctively to her feminine lips), and deciding, once she has caught the knack of the thing, to make a great a many little Adams but no little competitive Eves.

But Mr. Shaw, for all the underlying geniality and insouciance that drive him to undertake his own Genesis, is really in dead earnest. Aside from a half-hearted sally or so, he is bent on teaching us our ABC's in a decidedly godfartherly way: the man is serious the mood is sober, and the effect, I'm afraid, is preposterous. the actors, chucking about with their spades and revolving their knitting-sticks, are soulful, too: author and players seem to have been bitten by a high-school pageant.

Thereafter we are whirled into a rather familiarly mechanized future, a thing of push buttons, test-tubes, and revolving cylinders presided over briefly by a fussed Arthur Treacher. Mr. power and Miss Emerson are beginning to live now: he is 283 years old and she is 274, not allowing for cheating. And the society Shaw promises us for our maturity is near at hand, a world in which the truly wise will wear gold bots, speak with an Irish brogue, take no naps, never say dammit scorn such things as dancing and mating, hatch their young from oversize eggs and no longer have any patience with art. The vision is not, on the whole, terribly promising.

Mr. Shaw has, of course, walked into his own trap: having announced that the vision of man in his sixties or seventies is the vision of a mere child, he is forced to construct his "adult" world out of just that vision. perhaps he has proved his thesis: the evening does seem disturbingly juvenile.

It has it occasional gratifications. Arnold Moss has clipped some cheerful sentences from the published Preface to the play ("Politicians improve the world so gradually it is impossible to see the improvement") and he snaps them out, in beard and knickerbockers, with heartening relish. Mr. power has a pleasant moment as a clergyman with buck teeth, Miss Emerson is handsome in a massive curled wig, Richard Easton is a vigorous Cain, and Miss Bettis is light and fetching to look at.

But "Back to Methuselah" needs to be either more, or less, of a joke.

When Shaw's "Back to Methuselah" was produced in full in the Twenties — in new York, Birmingham and London —some groans were mingled with the applause. Arnold Bennett uttered a few notable lamentations.

In the original performances, "Back to Methuselah" was produced on three separate evenings in the form of three related plays. Beginning with Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, they carried the story of mankind through present time to 31,920 A.D.—"As Far As Thought Can Reach," which is the title of the concluding play.

In 1921 the Theatre Guild, of which Lawrence Langner was even then one of the fieriest particles, gave "Back to Methuselah" its first production. Since the guild expected to lose $30,000 and lost only $20,000, Shaw and Mr. Langner had no difficulty in showing that it earned $10,000 and was, therefore, a success. (When Sir Barry Jackson asked Shaw for permission to produce it in Birmingham, Shaw inquired: "Is your family provided for?")

Question of Cuts
Now Arnold Moss has reduced the original 90,000 words to 30,000 and produced a version that can be played in one evening. Costumed, bearded and bewigged to resemble Shaw, Mr. Moss appears in a prologue and between scenes to serve as the interlocutor. Under Margaret Webster's direction, the vest pocket "Back to Methuselah" is acted by Tyrone Power. Faye Emerson, Arthur Treacher, Valerie Bettis, Richard Easton, Deirdre Owen and M'el Dowd.

It is almost inevitable that readers familiar with the whole work should grumble over Mr. Moss' cuts. Although he has retained the main outline of "The Tragedy of an Elderly Gentleman," which is a heavy-handed play, he has eliminated most of the political persiflage in "Gospel of the Brothers Barnabas," which is in the Shavian style. He has also discarded the amorous Negress of the "the Thing Happens," who is one of the most entertaining characters in the whole of Shaw.

Here and there in the original play, there is more of Shaw at personality that remains in Mr. Moss' truncated version. but it is obviously easier to quibble than to reduce 90,000 words to 30,000 that are intelligible. Since Mr. Moss has had to solve many intimately than most people do and should not be faulted on matters of personal taste.

High-Minded Motive
To this theatergoer "Back to Methuselah," in both the original and the cameo version, is a ponderous play. In view of the high-mindedness of Shaw's motive and the intellectual grandeur of his dramatic conception, this is a comment that has to be made with respect. For no dramatist has ever been more dedicated to the welfare of mankind, and no one more grievously wounded by its follies.

When he was writing hits Pentateuch he was in his 60's. the first World War had profoundly discouraged him. It was a convulsion of the primordial beast that wrecked his hopes for a civilized world. Until 1914 he had blithely assumed that political, economic and social reforms would safeguard the future, and he had jauntily gone about the business of working at them.

But the savage irrationality of the first World War (when many people regarded Shaw as a traitor) shook his confidence in reform. "Back to Methuselah" represents an attempt to go beyond reform into a religion's a religion "without a church" that would promise a future for mankind. It is founded on the theory of Creative Evolution that in 1905 had yielded one of his most brilliant comedies, "Man and Superman."

Serious Thought
In "Back to Methuselah" he is dead serious. He says that civilization will collapse unless men will themselves into living long enough to learn how to govern and discipline themselves. Drawing on Lamarck, Darwin and several other philosophical or scientific sources (including Marx), he expresses his familiar faith that man can solve his problems by persistently willing to solve them, and that man can increase the length of his life by willing it. Apparently, man can; the insurance actuaries have statistics to prove it.

The early scenes contain Shaw's most endearing qualities. He had a passionate interest in the awakening of minds, which is always one of the wonders of civilization. The simple, seemingly artless portrait of Adam and Eve learning new things about life and savoring new words to express them; the angry, scornful scenes between Adam and Eve and Cain have the beauty of all growing things. Shaw could write about the origin of the species with kindness and devotion.

But his projection of the species into 2108, 3000 and 31,958 is more like science fiction than poetry, religion or creative literature. His portrait of the future contains about as much of his personality as the glazed white tiles in the sterilized operating room of a hospital.

Faithful Acting
If the text of the last parts of the play is arid, it is probably not logical to expect the actors to give jaunty performances. But art is not logical, and actors often have within themselves resources that are lacking in a script. Arthur Treacher, to be specific; In three secondary parts he plays with the irony and impishness of a Shavian actor, and his scenes have flavor.

The other actors do not let the script down. Taking Shaw's lines at face value, they act their parts with intelligence and alertness. But a little human iniquity would help them and all of us. Since Shaw's image of the world of the third millennium is conspicuously lacking in sin, a little sin in the acting would be welcome. It would remind us of human beings, and also of a prophet who tried never to be boring.

Shaw was 65 when "Back to Methuselah" was first produced. He was already at work on his next plan—"Saint Joan," a masterpiece.

It struck me, as I witnessed the New York opening of Bernard Shaw's "Back to Methuselah" at the Ambassador Theatre last night, that the old boy was endeavoring to wrap up the story of mankind and was not succeeding.

Here was a monumental consideration of the vagaries of life and death, originally meant to be produced in all its original 90,000 words, but now telescoped to the limits of a normal evening in the theatre through the services of Arnold Moss.

I have never read the play in its original form, and from the author's own postscript comes the statement that it is "either a world classic or it is nothing." I'm afraid it comes closer to falling in the latter category.

Mr. Moss, who acts as interlocutor in the role of the bearded author, introduces the scenes which take us from the Garden of Eden to an oasis in Mesopotamia a few centuries later; to a drawing room in the '20s,and then various science fiction locales reaching forward to 31,958 A.D. It is an extremely pretentious program, but I don't think it works.

NOT BEST SHAW
Mr. Shaw is saying, I believe that we can strive for and achieve a certain measure of immortality, but that it won't resolve the immutable facts of love and hate and despair.

The adaptation is skillfully contrived, the evening falls into a graceful and conventional pattern, but one does not come away with the feeling that the subject has been explored with exceptional wit or ingenuity. It is not the Beard at his brightest.

In point of fact the evening is a sort of glamorous catch-all, which has been established during this company's glorious road tour through the hinterlands.

Tyrone Power, Faye Emerson and Arthur Treacher are not apt to bar the parishioners from the guild hall, wherever they lift a curtain, and there are the added fillips of direction by Margaret Webster, some simple and superb sets by Marvin Reiss and the supplementary services of such players as Valerie Bettis, Mr. Moss (no slouch, himself), Richard Easton, Deirdre Owen and M'el Dowd.

From this location it seemed that Mr. Power and Miss Emerson came off with credit, although their roles are only occasionally captivating. One thing about a show that's been well broken in on the road the timing is good. Both stars succeed with incredibly fast costume changes.

Mr. Treacher quite naturally is allotted the few hilarious lines in the episode.

But the fact remains that Mr. Shaw at least in this Arnold Moss version has not done a very conclusive or entertaining job with his highly ambitious genesis. I wonder if it will work in New York.

"Back to Methuselah" a new version of the Bernard Shaw play by Arnold Moss, opened last night at the Ambassador Theatre, 215 W. 49th Str.

Here are comments on the play taken from a cross-section of the opening night audience.

"I enjoyed it tremendously simply because it was Shaw. I don't think the people behind the play, the director, writer, and producer, completely understood Shaw's meaning. They didn't go as deep as the author originally intended."
--Robert Leser, Manhattan, NY

"It was very good. The acting was terrific, and Tyrone Power was a pleasant surprise. I think, however, that this play will only appeal to a limited audience. The general public would rather see unclad beauties than hear philosophy.
--Ursula Potis, Jersey City, N.J.

"I thought this treatment of 'Back to Methuselah' was very well done. The sparse amount of scenery was used to good effect, and the cast got the most out of their parts. I liked it."
--Phillip Cea. Bayonne, N.J.

"I thought it was all right. I liked the acting very much but I didn't care for the script. I like my stories a little bit more down to earth. I guess it's just a matter of taste."
--Joyce Struve, Hasbrouck Heights, N.J. .

"As a play, 'Back to Methuselah' doesn't quite make it. It is too jam-packed with obvious philosophy. Arnold Moss made the basic mistake of having his actors mount a soapbox and preach, instead of entertaining."
--Jerome Ciotta, Brooklyn, NY

"Whatever this play was, it definitely wasn't Shaw. It didn't retain the Shaw sharpness and wit. the tone of the play stayed in one key and never let up. Much more variety is needed to sustain an audience for any length of time."
--Roslyn Diamond, Queens, NY