On Stage
SHIPLEY, JOSEPH T.
On STAGE By Joseph T. Shipley The Play Is Still the Thing The past fortnight has brought a quartet of plays with notable stars, and further evidence that not the performer but the play's the...
...That is, to dependence on her husband, who is dependent on his family for a job...
...One looks for the old-fashioned revue blackout after words like those...
...the dependent girl marries, but is being drawn back under the ruthless mother's spell when a twinge of conscience in the mother gives the girl her chance to fly to freedom...
...there is constant hilarity in this irreverent picture of a proud bigamist...
...Directed by Michael Gordon...
...The scene in which half a dozen people listen outside the door while the husband is trying to check on his wife's infidelity would be funnier in Parisian French than in American English...
...First offering of the Producers' Theater...
...Pennypacker,2 but the evening belongs to the author??and Glenn Anders...
...In the Summer House has moments of intensity which Judith Anderson deepens...
...As her secretary, in the unappetizing role of a discontented sycophant, Sam Jaffe gives another of his sensitive, warming performances...
...And the sweet romantic dream of overpowering love at first sight does not gain irony, but loses force, when we see it as the Epilogue after the play has shown us the swift dream's sordid but inevitable end...
...Fortunately, among the recent four, only one play presents that problem...
...Julie Harris as Colombe wins our hearts to her pleasure-loving ways, even though our minds tell us she is as excessively undisciplined as Julien is inhibited...
...The couple in the play are so obviously in love that there is no good reason why they were divorced...
...She is a dominating mother, contrasting with the dominated mother played by Mildred Dunnock...
...The play therefore invents a bad reason ??and an even worse one for their not reuniting...
...but Colombe is already preparing for further flights...
...Nothing...
...his life-loving wife finds in the theater??where Julien's mother is the swaggering star, and Julien's brother the carefree opportunist??just the gay life her nature demands...
...It is a long time since I have laughed so heartily at a play...
...pleads Julien's brother, admitting that he has given him horns...
...Celeste Holm is a charming person, but not that charming...
...1 In the Summer House...
...By Jane Bowles...
...Julie Harris and Edna Best are co-starred in Mademoiselle Colombe,3 but the play has too French a flavor for American favor...
...they strained too much...
...The happily married woman's husband is in New York overnight, and she exclaims: "Something horrible happens to me whenever I sleep alone...
...Presented by Robert L. Joseph and Jav Julien...
...Directed by Alan Schneider...
...The audience realizes this at once, but it takes the characters an act and a half to make the same discovery...
...As the elder churchman, Glenn Anders makes a triumphant entry upon the comic stage...
...Beat me...
...She is constantly on stage, delivering long monologues which give full play to her emotional range...
...Co-starring Celeste Holm and Robert Preston, His and Hers4 is the weakest of the four plays reviewed here...
...At the Playhouse...
...their dialogue is like those Fourth-of-July sparklers one holds at arm's length while they sputter and dazzle and die...
...the remainder is diffuse and therefore tends to be dull...
...Directed by Jose Quintero...
...At the Coronet Theater...
...By Fay and Michael Kanin...
...As I began by remarking, the play's the thing...
...Burgess Meredith and Martha Scott are listed as stars in The Remarkable Mr...
...by his defense of his conduct, he reduces the Presbyterian minister to the state of a baffled polyp, and he safeguards the marriage of his conservative daughter to the minister's minister son...
...Set in Southern California, In the Summer House has the color of country and seaside, and vivid Mexicans who scamper or sprawl across the stage: but its story is also a scamper and sprawl, rather than a coherent evocation of character and mood...
...Julien, the young life-hating husband, is drafted...
...Presented by Oliver Smith and the Playwrights Company...
...4 His and Hers...
...Directed by Harold Clurman...
...By Liam O'Brien...
...While they are catching up to us, we are growing increasingly bored at the sparklers...
...Jose Quintero, the director, lacks bold incisiveness, but has a sensitive hand...
...At the Longacre Theater...
...A popular actress may somewhat prolong a play's run, especially by increasing the advance sale, but once adverse reviews are out the most a star can do is to stave off a prompt closing...
...Judith Anderson, in In the Summer House,1 has what might be termed a vehicle...
...Pennypacker...
...3 Mademoiselle Colombe...
...At the 48th Street Theater...
...Pennypacker, with one family (eight children) in Wilmington and a second (nine children) in the City of Brotherly Love, is completely and argumentatively unashamed...
...A husband-and-wife writing-team writing about a husband-and-wife writing-team, the Kanins were perhaps self-conscious...
...What...
...the rest of the excellent cast seems pallid beside his scintillating vacuousness...
...On STAGE By Joseph T. Shipley The Play Is Still the Thing The past fortnight has brought a quartet of plays with notable stars, and further evidence that not the performer but the play's the thing...
...2 The Remarkable Mr...
...Presented by Robert Whitehead and Roper L. Stevens...
...Adapted from the French of Jean Anouilh by Louis Krooenberger...
...The bossy girl dies, leaving a rootless mother who turns to drink...
...As the dominating star, contemporary and rival of Bernhardt, Edna Best is allowed to substitute sound for sounder qualities...
...Presented by Albert Selden and Morton Gottlieb...
...Alan Schneider has directed astutely...
Vol. 37 • January 1954 • No. 4
