Stage

...The Fran Duffy we have seen is a girl who insists on being her own person and who grows into a woman in whom independence embodies loneliness, alienation of old friends, a disastrous marriage, a sense of failure...

...If it has a problem - and I think it does - it is rather like the one that kept me from embracing Hogan's Goat as enthusiastically as many people did...

...I suppose that the style of the new play, which still mixes the idiomatic and the specific with the unrealistic, but which this time eschews verse, might be called parlor player-piano...

...Putting those specific place names in," Alfred told New Yorker back in 1965, " it's a kind of instant poetry.'' It has become a kind of instant interior decoration which fills the minds and the speeches of the characters, attempts to place Frances Anna Duffy and her friends and relatives in time and place...

...It is more than fifteen years since Alfred tried to make art of Irish grandiloquence and found himself with a popular success on his hands...

...The play, performed without interruption, consists of five scenes which carry Fran Duffy from the defiant teen-ager on roller skates to the still testy wife and mother twenty years later...

...The texture of Curse, its cheerful artificiality, its show-business accouterments may make the "yes" possible...

...she looks about, then turns to the audience and says, "Yes...

...GERALD WEALES...

...At one point early in the play, one of the characters attempts to establish the importance of her family by pointing out that her grandmother, or one of her ancient relatives, almost married...

...he spoke, with a kind of amused admiration, of "the old grand-piano style" with which Alfred captured a verbal convention that mixed the genuine with the consciously artificial...

...The first scene, with the two girls on roller skates, sets the tone of the play...

...Although the new play includes madness, alcoholism, incipient incest, there is no flamboyance in the deployment of these elements - no bid for high tragedy, no use of grand melodrama, as there was in the earlier play...

...This quality is emphasized by the use of the trolley car and the scenes on it as introductions to each of the sequences...

...The son's expressed doubt follows the regenerative kiss, and Fran's words are not strong enough to counter his unhappi-ness...

...The centerpiece of the play, the long third scene in which Fran cooks dinner for each of her three suitors - the upward-mobility prig, the religious young man afraid of sex and marriage, the virginal ladies' man - is played like a series of revue sketches...

...and a name came quickly, disappeared with the end of the line, never to be referred to again...

...Her story, told in other terms, might verge on soap opera, but the surprise of Curse is that Alfred seems to have decided to use his attraction to the theatrical in playful ways...

...It is possible that Alfred intends the final scene between Fran and Jo-Jo, the kiss requested and given, to have some of the force of the birthing of the calf at the end of Heartland, a life image in the midst of pain and despair, but the scene in the play does not work as the one in the film does...

...Curse opens on Fran Duffy, dressed in her sensible 1942 coat, as she stands in what we do not yet know is her secret place...

...In the last scene, her son, faced with the alcoholism of his father, the long feud between Fran and Jo-Jo and their painfully hesitant reconciliation, the madness of the aunt, his own constant humiliation, cries out against life, screaming that he will have nothing to do with it...

...He has returned to Brooklyn in The Curse of an Aching Heart, but this time the ambitions of both the characters and the playwright are smaller than they were in Hogan's Goat...

...It is sentimental, nostalgic, funny, and it does allow two adult actresses to be kids again, doing a song and dance on skates...

...Fran insists that he will and, he having disappeared into the wings, the final "yes," like the opening one, is directed to the audience...

...Dunaway, whose appearance in Hogan's Goat sent her to Hollywood and stardom, is impressive all through the play, but then the performances are generally effective even when the play asks the characters to walk the line between stage type and human being...

...The Curse of an Aching Heart is, then, an imaginative play, handsomely mounted, a pleasure to sit through...

...The presumed point of the play in both cases seems not to grow out of the material presented...

...If the limited run has not come to an end before this review appears, I would advise going to look for yourself, testing whether or not form can triumph over content...

...I thought I heard Matthew Stanton, the protagonist of Hogan's Goat, but if I am inventing the reference, it is a legitimate conjuration since Curse is the offspring of Hogan's Goat...

...If the closing '' yes'' is not implicit in the action of the play, it may lie in the method...

...The second scene gives Fran Duffy her first real shock - a sexual attack from her beloved uncle Jo-Jo - but it also gives Faye Dunaway an appealing song that carries in its hijinks a sense of the gaiety and the underlying danger in both 1920s naughtiness and a girl's becoming a woman...

...And still a "yes" to life...

...These have become part of the details of existence, like the songs, the games, the menus, the references to streets and stores and performers...

...It has its own attractions...

...We then go back to 1923 and work our way to 1942 again...

...There are set emotional bits, particularly in the last two scenes, but much of the play seems to have been conceived to allow the playwright, the director, the designer, and the performers to have fun with a somewhat lugubrious story...

...The new play takes place between 1923 and 1942, as against the 1890s of Goat, and it has moved from the public arena in which Matthew Stanton and Ned Quinn vied for power, into the private worlds in which characters struggle to hold on to an unsure sense of place and self...