On Stage
SHIPLEY, JOSEPH T.
On STAGE By Joseph T. Shipley Two Big-Name Disappointments Two imposing disappointments have struck Broadway. One is an American dramatization of a noted Frenchman's plea for understanding. The...
...The sly servant Bachir and the dignified homosexual Moktir are both well drawn and well acted...
...then daughter rebounds into the arms of a nearby up-and-comer, one Barnabas Kaghan...
...and she is cast as the scatterbrained (though good-looking) and foggy-minded Lady Liz...
...That seems, indeed, to be Eliot's point, and an object lesson to the many who bought their tickets in advance...
...Marcelline grows more and more desperately tipsy, until the husband tells her to go back to France...
...As a playwright, Eliot has reached the point of literary inebriety in which names in themselves seem sources of humor...
...As the play opens, Claude is preparing to tell Lizzie that his new confidential clerk (private secretary), Colby Simpkins, is really his illegitimate son...
...These are, as a matter of fact, about as important as anything else in this talky, undramatic and...
...The audience watches the play's thesis...
...Barney turns out to be Lizzie's long-lost son...
...Then Colby turns out (through one of the old-time cradle switches) not to be Claude's son...
...Guzzard" and "Barnabas...
...returns to Normandy...
...This is not Gide's solution, but it rounds off one stage of the struggle and marks an ending for the play...
...Rose felt that this pointed a way to circumvent the critics...
...the astute producer Billy Rose persuaded the critics to hold off their reviews during a week of "preview" performances, and meanwhile arranged for some pleasant television discussions of the play...
...The author, alas, seems also befogged...
...Fleeing from shadows of his former self to honeymoon in North Africa, Michel is spied on and exploited by an unscrupulous servant, finds homosexual solace in a nearby orchard grove, and neglects his wife...
...indeed, more aptly used by...
...His story is loblolly stuff, more fit for...
...Directed by Daniel Mann...
...But now she's stuck with Barney...
...Michel, more alone than ever ??”exploited by his kind, shunned by the "normal...
...The man matches this with a sense that society has been unfair to him...
...By Ruth and Augustus Goetz, from the book by Andre Gide...
...The girl has but one pitch throughout the year's span of the drama: the self-pitying martyrdom of one who loves at any cost...
...Directed by E. Martin Browne...
...Instead of sand, in The Confidential Clerk2 T. S. Eliot gives us water, shifting water, much of it vaporized...
...At the Royale Theater...
...At the Morosco Theater...
...who, under the unbelievable appellation of Lucasta Angel, has the run of Claude's house and spends too much of his money...
...Ruth and Augustus Goetz have worked hard to make a play out of Andre Gide's The Immoralist,1 the tale of an ill-fated woman who loves and marries a homosexual...
...Son and daughter fall in love...
...Lady Elizabeth Mulhammer, in her indiscreet premarital days, had had an illegitimate son, for the care of which the father was paying, until a charging rhinoceros obliterated him before he could tell Lizzie where the child was being reared...
...Gilbert and Sullivan...
...uninteresting play...
...2 The Confidential Clerk...
...then you may discover that it's not what you want, but now you're stuck and you have to learn to live with it...
...so Lucasta could have married him after all...
...that homosexuality is a misfortune, not a crime...
...he, too, is self-pitying, yet he, too, will follow his own course come what may...
...Even before the play reached New York, however, there was trepidation as to how Broadway would receive it...
...together he and Marcelline will make one more forlorn trial...
...The other is the most recent London success of a one-time American poet turned British citizen...
...The audience is stuck with the play...
...During the recent newspaper strike, paid television comments gave quite a boost to Kismet...
...Ina Claire alone matches her role...
...Before leaving, she finds out that she is pregnant...
...And Lizzie's husband, the wealthy financier Sir Claude, has an illegitimate daughter (oh, this English aristocracy...
...By T. S. Eliet...
...his characters take a good deal of time out to chew over names like "Mrs...
...Even the acting is on a lower level than we would expect from Claude Rains and the other players...
...Presented by Billy Rose...
...You may get what you have wished for, says the erstwhile poet...
...In the drama, Marcelline thrusts herself upon and marries the reluctant Michel when he returns to Normandy from one of his archeological trips...
...The week's wait did not bring the play up to Broadway par...
...Both Geraldine Page and Louis Jourdan, in their different ways, achieve a marrowless monotone that squeezes any vitality or sympathy from their roles...
...argued through puppets and dragged across a desert of sand...
...Presented by Henry Sherek and the Producers' Theater...
...Perhaps Mr...
...On the whole, The Immoralist is written sensitively, with sympathy for both parties to this foredoomed marriage and with a genuine and fairly successful effort to probe their minds...
...The fatal weakness of the production lies in the inability of the stars to give variety and depth to the characters...
...1 The Immoralist...
Vol. 37 • March 1954 • No. 9
