On Stage
SHIPLEY, JOSEPH T.
On STAGE By Joseph T Shipley Fine Performances In Uneven Plays Patate. From the French of Marcel Achard by Irwin Shaw. Directed by Jed Horner. Presented by Gilbert Miller. At Henry Miller's...
...Son-in-law Walling, after nine years as bank teller promoted to loan officer, gets a dog suit for a club masquerade and begins to wear it around the house, and the neighborhood...
...Hence we have devices...
...The Man in the Dog Suit attacks two basic American problems, "Mom-ism' and "Keeping Up With the Joneses...
...Directed by William Gaskill...
...At the Plymouth Theater...
...For fear today's audience might miss the point, it is pressed home in several other instances, some told, some briefly seen onstage...
...Elliot, he is a substitute for the son she has lost in the war...
...More than usual, too, is the high quality of the plays, with varied reservations...
...Elliot and, more thoroughly, to her eager daughter—over whose shoulder, before leading her up her mother's stairs to his "etchings," he exclaims: "Lust, the coarsest detergent !" The dullness of the Elliots is ruthlessly exposed, with their petty pretensions and family hates, for such superior laughter as you may summon...
...Such symbols of rebellion were frequent 30 years ago...
...and all the hard work of Tom Ewell as the patate, the "patsy," cannot prevent the current version from seeming at times an attempt at serious social comedy, at times an attempt at light French farce—and always not quite either...
...Hence, just when Dillon has money to escape, we find him caught in the coils of the life that he despises...
...does not apply, for this girl's magnificent body contains a magnificent IQ...
...BROADWAY is pressing upon the playgoer more choices than in several seasons past...
...There is a lectern at each side of the stage...
...Robert Stephens, Wendy Craig and Eileen Herlie head a cast that emphasizes the self-centered phoniness of the man and the dreariness of the others...
...Presented by the Producers Theater...
...Epitaph for George Dillon...
...But the problems of the professor and his wife do not fill an evening...
...Dillon, by "dirtying" a play he has written, gets some royalties for its provincial tour...
...the two teachers in turn step off and lecture to their class—the audience...
...This naturally applies to the in-laws as well...
...The author also strains in the dialogue, seeming impelled to cap every cleverness with a witticism...
...By Leslie Stevens...
...The Mam in the Dog Suit...
...The notion of a man having an affair with the daughter of a supposed friend, to seem funny to Americans, requires delicate handling indeed...
...But by then the authors have given us the pregnant girl in the third act...
...The famous retort of Bernard Shaw to Isadora Duncan: "Suppose it has my body and your mind...
...At the Golden Theater...
...They play a noted professor and the college dean of women, his wife, into whose life comes a Valkyrie who wants a child by the professor...
...But the play is, in the main, amusing, both Boyer and Colbert are at their best, and the young Valkyrie, Julie Newmar, needs only to be seen to be feted...
...This, adapter Irwin Shaw has not provided...
...former teacher Eileen Stoddard is now the family lush, in her inebriate moments quoting long lines of Latin...
...Hence, former dentist Gaxton is now the smiling president of the Stoddard bank, but spends evenings in the cellar setting inlays into an elephant's tusk...
...But this scornful play is unable to make us believe that anyone in it is worth caring about...
...This interrupts the emotional flow, as for instance at the close, when the dean leaves her penitent husband on his knees to tell her class in home science that this is the point at which to forgive—then goes back to forgive him...
...Directed by Ralph Nelson...
...At the Coronet Theater...
...By Albert Beich and William H. Wright...
...From the book by Edwin Corle...
...At Henry Miller's Theater...
...Every child of wealthy Mrs...
...The evening is furnished, however, with literate dialogue, especially for Carmen Mathews as the tipsy wife, and with deft performances by a large oast headed by Hume Cronyn and Jessica Tandy...
...Another superbly performed play with literate dialogue, The Marriage-Go-Round, brings Claudette Colbert from too long an absence back to the stage, neatly balanced with Charles Boyer...
...The Marriage-Go-Rownd...
...To gushy Mrs...
...Least can be said for Patate, a long-run hit in Paris...
...Presented by Paul Gregory...
...Directed by Joseph Anthony...
...Hence we cannot take the story seriously, though it is often fun...
...By John Osborne and Anthony Creighton...
...Stoddard must have the right kind of job, the right home, the right club membership...
...The end is ironic...
...Presented by David Merrick and Joshua Logan...
...He makes love to the frustrated sister of Mrs...
...More serious, even sombre, is Epitaph for George Dillon, in which "the angry young man" of England is displayed as the scornful young man...
...Dillon, as soon as he is alone, looks at the son's picture and says "You stupid bastard...
...Dillon spends most of the year we watch pretending, perhaps even hoping, to be a superior being, an artist, while by voice and manner he spews scorn upon the family that shelters and feeds him...
Vol. 41 • November 1958 • No. 42
