On Stage
SHIPLEY, JOSEPH T.
On STAGE Season Opens On Gay Note By Joseph T Shipley The Loud Red Patrick. By John Boruff, from the book by Ruth McKenney. Directed by Robert Douglas. Presented by Richard W. Krakeur, R. Douglas...
...The abominable habit of "type casting," grafted upon Broadway from Hollywood (with a scion of Stanislavsky), shows how needless it is with players who can act...
...he sees them growing to become lawyers, doctors, man's equal in work, opportunity and responsibility...
...Wayne proves himself an artist in waslrelsy...
...It is not only unnecessary but stultifying, as this play brilliantly demonstrates...
...Back in Ireland, Pat had been subjected to tyranny, violence and poverty...
...David Wayne's performance brings to mind the pixilated Elwood P. Dowd of Harvey, or the irresponsible but likable—happy-go-lucky, but so seldom lucky—pay-cocks of O'Casey's early plays...
...The play's deft direction, which appears in the effective tumult of the sisters, is also neatly manifest in the work of David Wayne...
...once they've added learning to their arsenal, and almost frightens Penrose away from his bride-to-be...
...his part is a romantic excrescence in the farcical comedy...
...Each has as many votes as years...
...He learns that self-government, like charity, must begin at home...
...Democracy and matrimony triumph...
...the girls, aged 7, 10, 16 and 17, can by sticking together outvote their 45-year-old dad...
...Pat Flannigan lives in the Cleveland of 1912...
...and then is called upon to govern...
...Young Penrose, Maggie's boy friend, seems not merely shy but stupid...
...Pat's old pal, Mr...
...Finnegan...
...Even Finnegan seems to be in for another session of what is sometimes referred to as wedded bliss...
...these three evils he has sworn to keep from his children...
...He is, therefore, not above stooping to occasional bribes, as when his old friend Finnegan, giving up his job to avoid paying alimony, is voted an invitation to come live with them...
...This year, the first play, The Loud Red Patrick, is a superbly played and amusingly written picture of a widower with four lively daughters...
...Both Flannigan and Finnegan want the women out of the house...
...The race as well as the individual is caught in the phrase...
...The "loud red Patrick" Arthur Kennedy, with sideburns and flaming Irish disposition, is a naturally domineering man tempered by his ideals...
...Flannigan wants them into the schools...
...an amusing picture of a widower with four daughters on his hands, turns out to be an engaging picture of the girls bringing up father...
...Finnegan wants them out because they are man's ruination...
...Presented by Richard W. Krakeur, R. Douglas and David Wayne...
...The roles they play are quite different from their earlier parts...
...is a horse of another shoe...
...The author has given him some effective lines...
...yet, they fit into them with natural ease and grace...
...The test of Pat's democracy arrives when he wants Maggie to go to Vassar College, for Maggie has found a young man with whom she prefers matrimony...
...The four Flannigan sisters—this sounds like a circus troupe, and when they are together there seems to be a family circus—are amusing performers, but it's time to say a word about Arthur Kennedy and David Wayne, of whom Broadway and Ireland can be proud...
...Outvoted, Pat disgraces himself by defying the children...
...He shudders to think of the harm they'll do...
...At the Ambassador Theater...
...His problem of governing his children is complicated by his problem of governing himself...
...Maggie and her sisters recognize—with a common sense grown rarer since their day—that woman's role, without being less valid than man's, may be quite different...
...Whether he is nonchalantly punching a hole in the straw hat of Maggie's boy friend, or dancing a merry or a tipsy step across the dining-room floor, be is in complete command of the character, the situation and the audience...
...He has all the pigheaded fire of the Hibernian who cries, "If there's a government, I'm agin it...
...which his rendition flavors, as when, taking a wine glass to drink to Maggie's success at Vassar, he remarks: "I prefer the grain to the grape...
...And The Loud Red Patrick...
...The Flannigans' shenanigans thereupon become ingeniously devilish, fascinatingly riotous—and successful...
...His most amusing moments include some when he is not seen...
...He begins by practicing democracy at home, in the form of a family council...
...The Broadway season usually starts with a bad play...
...From the curtained alcove which is his bedroom, Finne-gan's arm reaches unerringly for the whiskey bottle: he calls out a word to cap the argument of those on stage...
...But in the characters of the other two men there is more than the surface farce...
...or, brushing aside the concealing curtain, he stands, his silence eloquent with disapproval...
Vol. 39 • October 1956 • No. 43
