“Why oh why oh why oh/ Why did we ever leave Ohio?”

So sang Ruth and Eileen Sherwood in Wonderful Town, the 1953 Broadway musical based on Ruth McKenney’s autobiographical play (and subsequent hit film) My Sister Eileen. And generations of game gals up from the country in search of big-city adventure have felt the same. A couple of decades after Leonard Bernstein, Betty Comden, and Adolph Green wrote “Ohio,” Stephen Sondheim covered some of the same turf in his twitchy pop score for Company. “Another Hundred People” is a terrific image for a song—the hundreds and hundreds of people swarming off the buses and up out of the subway on to the streets of Manhattan every minute of the day, as if sheer proximity will ensure intimacy. Instead, you lapse into a kind of manic loneliness:

And they meet at parties
Through the friends of friends
Who they never know
Will you pick me up
Or do I meet you there
Or shall we let it go?

The latest Ohioan innocents to wash up in the big town are Marge Bonner and Elsie Dorfman, and they took longer to get here than the Misses Sherwood. Dawn Powell, also of Ohio, wrote her play, Walking Down Broadway, in 1931 and this is its first ever production—by the Mint Theatre Company, as part of a season of works by female playwrights. In the preceding three-quarters of a century, Miss Powell sold her script