Gilroy Is Here
SCHNEIDER, ALAN
ON STAGE By Alan Schneider Gilroy Is Here With a typically eclectic theater season now past the halfway mark—and everyone admitting it is already better than last year's nullity—Broadway...
...In our present drought, it looms impressively despite its intermittent sentimentality and slight air of contrivance...
...But had the author tried a bit harder, his play might have been welcomed as the Plowboy of the Western World...
...Our realistic playwrights, as Mary McCarthy has lately reminded us, tend to write human-interest stories such as are found on the pages of the daily newspaper...
...Not that Gilroy should merely be concerned (as he probably is) about the larger implications of his theme: of whether the people and world of today were worth saving and dying for 15 years ago—or now...
...The balance of native dramatic power is shifting south (or east) of Shubert Alley...
...Orpheum Theater, 126 2nd Avenue) has finally answered the question of who (or what) will save the long-ailing Phoenix...
...He and his director, Dan Petrie, have been fortunate in finding three players (Gerald O'Loughlin, Rebecca Darke and William Smithers) who have worked and matured together at the Actors Studio, and who are now playing together with real connection and compassion...
...Author and director have not been as successful, however, with the interpretation of the visitor's mother, and this deficiency seriously affects what should be one of the play's climactic scenes...
...Plowboy lacks the dimension, the insight, the heroic or the tragic sense of life which could lift it above the merely pathetic...
...this is his first work for the theater...
...Years later, as the play begins, the plowboy—saddled with a barren and loveless marriage, a purposeless job and a faceless existence—is visited by his savior, who is wracked by his old war wound and tormented with the need to know if his sacrifice has been at all worthwhile...
...Gilroy is an experienced film and TV writer...
...it depends upon those essential and universal elements which make the special situation meaningful and true...
...That's a tall order, of course...
...It is purely on the human plane that he has not succeeded in transcending his material and making it reach out beyond itself to pierce our individual consciences...
...The sequence in which Smithers as the visitor and Miss Darke as the plowboy's wife hover between resentment and understanding is a shattering experience...
...But drama requires something more than a concern for the particular...
...At the same time, it is precisely the work of several newer playwrights (together with a number of older ones like Brecht, O'Casey, Behan and Wilder) that has recently rescued off-Broadway from its early-season rash of half-baked musicals and over-baked revivals...
...Gilroy's characters are warmly and believably drawn, his observation acute, his ear chillingly accurate...
...Unquestionably first among several unequals who make up the new wavelet is Frank Gilroy, whose Who'll Save the Plowboy...
...What is missing behind all the reportorial accuracy of detail and piled-on pallor is insight, intensification, enlargement...
...ON STAGE By Alan Schneider Gilroy Is Here With a typically eclectic theater season now past the halfway mark—and everyone admitting it is already better than last year's nullity—Broadway has still not exposed a serious work of any distinction by a new American writer...
...The play is an intensely felt, carefully constructed study of lower-middleclass stagnation, slightly old-fashioned in style and in its unvaryingly grim drabness, but honestly expressed...
...The "plowboy" of the title is a likeable but plodding member of Manhattan's Lumpenproletariat, whose life had been saved during the War by one of his Army buddies...
...The ensuing meeting, circumscribed on all sides with evasions, deceptions and bitter ironies, eventually strips both men clean, layer by layer...
...Like, say, the Arthur Miller of The Man Who Had All the Luck, Gilroy shows real promise...
...in the process, the friend himself was wounded...
...And somewhere in the process comes partial redemption, or at least a measure of growth— although here is where the author's intentions are least certain and his effects most specious...
...Adaptations, importations, musicalizations remain our commercial troika...
...Yet even though it falls short, we surely must be grateful to the Phoenix that Gilroy is here...
Vol. 45 • February 1962 • No. 4
