A Play for radio and Mrs. Jacoby in Tokyo
SHIPLEY, JOSEPH T.
On STAGE By Joseph T. Shipley A Play for Radio and Mrs. Jacoby in Tokyo The Riraly. By Norman Corwin. Directed by Mr. Corwin. Presented by Cheryl Crawford and Joel Schenker. At the Bijou...
...The glimpse of Japanese family ways is delightful...
...Presented by the Theater Guild and Dore Schary...
...Raw-boned, slow and soft-spoken Abraham Lincoln is alone...
...Hence there is no sense of living drama...
...Asano, Gertrude Berg is natural, unaffected...
...As the future Mrs...
...Neitlier manages to make it seem that the words are being spoken in fresh pasision...
...And in Tokyo, when Asano—with suitable Japanese indirection—proposes to Mrs...
...It makes a risibly ridiculous and at the same time a somewhat searching tangle...
...A table and three chairs suffice for the setting...
...So states the program of The Rivalry, which deals with the Lincoln-Douglas debates...
...The other performers, including Mae Questel as the Brooklyn neighbor, fill in the story and help make A Majority of One a play the vast majority will vastly enjoy...
...Kosher Girl in Tokyo" is the unusual turn to the Abie's Irish Rose theme Leonard Spigelgass amusingly gives to his middle-age romance...
...Jacoby's shoes are taken off at Asano's threshold, we watch one of the funniest scenes in recent theater, as kosher Brooklyn tries to fit into Buddhist Japan...
...Most of the evening, we listen to Martin Gabel reciting bits of Douglas' speeihes and Richard Boone bits of Lincoht's...
...Granting the unlikely premise that a cultured Japanese would be attracted to a housewifely orthodox Jewess from Brooklyn, common-sensical and practical but without any culture, even horticulture—the rest of the story follows free...
...Corywin seems to have tackled it as a research problem and prepared a radio reconstruction of the debates...
...At the Bijou Theater...
...Any semblance of dramatic conflict is smudged into sentiment as we hear of Douglas' support of Lincoln in the Senator's dying days...
...NORMAN CORWIN thanks "Carl Sandburg...
...and the Blacks give her quite a lecture on understanding and tolerance...
...Douglas, who is charmingly played by Nancy Kelly...
...Jacoby meets Koichi Asano, a wealthy businessman whose cough she seeks to cure...
...But on the ship to Japan Mrs...
...Cedric Hardwicke is Japanese to the life, quick to take offence but ready to understand, dignified yet tender...
...the children shudder from the idea of a Japanese in the family, and their own lecture on understanding turns neatly back upon them...
...A Majority of One...
...Ralph G. Newman...
...It is nothing more than an acted-out episode of history...
...Most writers of plays about Lincoln—there have been many and there will be more—have soaked themselves in the material about the man, which is of course public property...
...Here the play completes its thought that, beneath the pigmentation, men and women can come to an understanding as human beings any where...
...The most natural, and the only touching moments are the two talks between Lincoln and Mrs...
...At the Shubert Theater...
...A neighbor is complaining about the influx of Puerto Ricans...
...From the moment Mrs...
...for the first time, as though they were just rising in the speaker's mind...
...Carl Haverlin and the Illinois State Historical Society for historical source material relating to this production...
...The opposition between the two men is swept away by the War, for both believe that the Union must be preserved...
...It tells a pleasantly sentimental tale while it points an obvious but often disregarded moral...
...But the arguments of Douglas, who believes the Negro is an inferior order of being, are such as one would not expect to hear today outside of a Klan meeting in a hillbilly hideaway...
...A few months later, the tables are turned as Asano watches the Sabbath candles being lit in Brooklyn...
...What he has produced belongs on the air rather than on the stage...
...By Leonard Spigelgass...
...Jacoby's daughter comes to Brooklyn, with her husband Jerome Black, to announce Jerry's assignment to the Embassy at Tokyo...
...Stephen A. Douglas, successful politician campaigning for reelection, is accompanied by his wife...
...But many times in the course of the evening I felt the impulse to turn the dial and see what else was on the air...
...And all Lincoln does is to repeat that the Declaration of Independence said all men are equal, not just British colonials—at least, all are equally entitled to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness...
...It deals, of course, with "the Negro question," which the Southern fight against integration presses into our minds...
...Douglas is used as an in-betweener, to fill the gaps around the speeches and to carry the story beyond, to the War Between the States and the death of her husband...
...She plays with an ease, at times with a self-satisfied strut, at once amusing and endearing...
...Directed by Dore Schary...
...As such, we may ask whether it is well chosen...
Vol. 42 • March 1959 • No. 10
