On Stage
SHIPLEY, JOSEPH T.
n STAGE By Joseph T Shipley Old Year Ends With Mixed Bill Uncle Willie. By Julie Berns and Irving Elman, with I. B. Joselow. At the Golden Theater. Purple Dust. By Sean O'Casey. Designed by...
...And O'Casey has made the two complete fools...
...Protective Custody...
...Where else can the body be put...
...Presented by Courtney Burr and Burgess Meredith...
...Purple Dust proves that kissing the Blarney Stone is not enough...
...To detail the mental torture would torture the audience...
...The last openings of 1956 were a curious quartet: a comedy, a satiric drama, and—after a long dearth— two thrillers...
...She will continue to hold a high place in the annals of the American stage...
...Ruth Draper was one of our few artists of high seriousness, sustaining and expanding the power of the theater at its best...
...At the Royale Theater...
...Sean O'Casey can whip up a lather of words...
...But there is some interest in watching the roundabout scheming of the family's best friend...
...All who saw her work came from the theater enriched, perhaps ennobled...
...The men are made childish...
...To get her out at the end, furthermore, the authors hoist the interrogator on his own Freudian complex...
...The question is: What is he going to shave...
...Abie's Irish Rose, motion pictures, soap opera have heated and reheated the old melting pot...
...A sort of "bad seed" grown up, she goes for the man she wants by killing his first wife and now plotting the death of his second so that blame will fall on the new wife's little stepson...
...We can even surmise whose body...
...but here the play is caught in a dilemma...
...We watch the bubbles, the froth, the foam, the thick and sudsy cream...
...The tumbledown house is more humorously designed than the play...
...At the Cherry Lane Theater...
...The girls go off with two of the Irish workers, just before the floods inundate the old mansion and the English love of the past...
...Let's hope for a happier New Year...
...Little need, be said of Uncle Willie except that it shows Menasha Skulnik at his best...
...O'Casey's countryman Shaw was quite a shaver of sham...
...By Audrey and William Roos...
...They whirl up a final stir as little controlled as the flurry of dust on a windy corner—and it blows all the drama away...
...At the Ambassador Theater...
...but so is the comedy...
...Presented by Paul Shyre, Noel Behn, Howard Gottfried, Lewis Manilov...
...merely to suggest it makes the girl's collapse seem unreal...
...this is a routine story adorned with a comic artist...
...one must have ideas to inhabit the colorful words...
...Set by Peter Larkin...
...Designed by Lester Polakov...
...Speaking of Murder...
...Her dramatic portraits recall the poetic portraits in the monologues of Browning...
...The brainwashing is a combination of Freudian probing and Chinese patient detail...
...the younger takes a shot at an innocent cow he calls a wild bull...
...On a superb set, a former convent with high holy windows now an efficient Soviet torture center and jail, Faye Emerson, and Fritz Weaver as the interrogator, give excellent performances...
...For the greater part of her 72 years, Miss Draper, writing and presenting her monologues, had been peopling the stage with richly revealed personalities, fully and tenderly caught...
...All the Irish, sweet or sycophantic or surly as they may be, join in contempt for the English whenever the two are not around...
...A more natural and sinister situation gives initial grimness to the misnamed Protective Custody, which shows an American woman columnist kidnaped for a brainwashing behind the Iron Curtain...
...But, in Purple Dust, when O'Casey hones the razor we find that the beards are false...
...He shows us two silly-ass Englishmen who have come with their Irish mistresses to restore an old mansion in Ireland...
...By Howard Richardson and William Berney...
...There's no point to whipping up a lather unless one has a beard...
...The only feature of the Englishmen O'Casey seems to respect is their wealth—of which the two girls make sure they get a goodly share...
...His suitcase of tricks from the Yiddish stage has been carried over to Broadway, where again he proves a most persuasive salesman...
...The story of the play has made a similar migration: Uncle Willie is a salesman from the Lower East Side, whose ward (his niece from Europe) marries and settles in the young Bronx, renting the upper half of her two-family house to a prolific Irish policeman...
...It's all rather obvious, but there's wry fun in watching Estelle Winwood as an old neighbor who ekes a bit of blackmail from the proceedings...
...EXJOYMENT of the superb artistry of Ruth Draper gave way to a profound sense of loss at her sudden death in the midst of her current season...
...The elder is constantly misquoting poets he misnames...
...Speaking of Murder makes the large, airtight, soundproof vault too prominent...
Vol. 40 • January 1957 • No. 3
