This is a season in which great things are expected on Broadway. Robert Sherwood's "Out of Hell" opens in Providence in a few days, and Elmer Rice, Maxwell Anderson, and other honored playwrights promise big things. Tennessee Williams, newly risen through "The Glass Menagerie," is the focus of the big town's attention this week--but "You Touched Me" is no "Glass Menagerie," despite its merits.

"Glass Menagerie," though it wasn't a comedy, showed that Mr. Williams of the geographical handle was a humorist with a nice sense of recent American history. Teamed with Donald Windham and adapting a D. H. Lawrence story with an English setting, Williams now quits poignancy and takes to straight comedy, takes to it like a duck to water.

While it gets off to a slow start, "You Touched me" succeeds very well as comedy, mostly because of Edmund Gwenn, but where "The Glass Menagerie" had a well-knit cast, Gwenn pulls the cast of "You Touched Me" a little off-balance. And unlike "The Glass Menagerie," the more topical new prodigy of Tennessee Williams types its characters.

Briefly and the plot is simple enough to be briefly suggested. "You Touched Me: is about an English-Canadian air force leftenant (Montgomery Clift) who visits his fester home after an absence of more than five years looking ostensibly for the kindness he has missed is an orphan and an emigre.

Thinking he has found the kindness in his foster sister (Mariapne Stewar), he makes her his target for tonight, supported by the bibulous ex-sea captain (Gwenn) who brought him home from the orphanage.

Our young hero, who has somewhere picked up an accent that is neither Canadian, cockney, nor English, is opposed by his foster-father's sister (Catherine Willard), a "congenital virgin," and is not very elaborately received by the object of his attentions, either: she has "acquired her virginity," but she naturally has a change of heart before the final curtain.

As the quotations above indicate, "You Touched Me" frequently depends for its humor on the shock of ribaldry, but while it's not as tender as "The Glass Menagerie" it's never really vulgar.

Still rough in spots, "You Touched Me" has great potentialities as a valid hit-- and not just a box-office hit. Changes are in the offing: "A Muscle Dancer" is mentioned on the program but never appears--the man in the Shubert's front office said, "See the play in New York; he'll be in it then."