The lead in this production was Hal March, who was making his legitimate stage debut. Tackling the role in which Paul Douglas scored on Broadway, he proved he could do more than fire questions at TV contestants in isolation booths. In fact, he gave a smooth and consistent performance. His only serious lapse came near the close of the first act, where he had a heart-to-heart talk with his young son and reminisced about his dead wife. This is hard to pull off, but the writing is so fine that it still emerged as one of the two most memorable scenes in the play. The other scene occurred later when Uncle Max, splendidly played by Bill Tierney, blustered on and on with incredible outspokenness and tactlessness until he caused the unspeakable embarrassment of all present.
Though the play is unpretentious, its genuineness has led Maurice Schwartz, our foremost Yiddish actor-producer, to turn it into a Yiddish musical for the coming season. One cannot help but recognize the warmth and honesty of Schulman's writing.
To show what captivated New Yorkers in the early 1920's, the Summer Theatre dusted off Dulcy, by George S. Kaufman and Marc Connelly. It strikes us as a period piece today, but it was written as a contemporary satire on the Westchester County middle-class set of 1921.
With Lynn Fontanne in the title role, the play ran on Broadway for months, and "Dulcy" became a household word. But tastes and standards change, and the play today is little more than a feather-weight farce and a historical curiosity.
Dulcinea Smith is a witless, bromidic, meddlesome but well-meaning woman with a mania for engineering other people's lives. She manages to have a finger in every pie and a foot in every mouth. In a bridge game she wonders whether she should "discard from strength or weakness." Actually, she does everything from weakness.
This summer's Dulcy was Dody Goodman, a refugee from the Jack Paar TV show. She has one of the most unpleasant and whiny voices I've ever heard on the stage; but that is probably an advantage for this role. Heaven help her if she ever tries to play another type of woman, though!
As the ancient poet Horace said, "Dulcy est desipere in loco."
The season included the tryouts of two new plays, which sandwiched a hammy production of The Happiest Millionaire (with Victor Jory). The first tryout was Sweet and Sour, by Florence Lowe and Caroline Francke. It proved to be just one more play about the younger generation's attempt to deal with an intractable old father. The authors obviously thought they were writing the Jewish counterpart of Life With Father, but their play will never have 3183 performances on Broadway. They fell into most of the traps that Schulman avoided in A Hole in the Head. The old Jew was played by Melvyn Douglas, who is having a second career these days by taking on "character" parts; but even he could not make the play ring true.
The other tryout was Third Best Sport, by Eleanor and Leo Bayer. (The third best sport turned out to be convention-going, after sex and baseball.) The play is a propaganda comedy about non-conformity, hypocrisy and group-ism. It is an inept concoction of situational cliches, overworn ideas and stereotyped characters. There is the sour corporation president, the xenophobic grande dame, the iconoclastic philosophy professor, the ambitious junior executive, and the young wife who upsets everything by refusing to be a lickspittle. The structure is creaky, and the turns of the plot wholly predictable. Celeste Holm did her best as the young wife, but she was just wasting her time.
The Tufts Arena Theatre is not in a class with the other two groups, nor does it pretend to be. It is a semi-professional institution whose members are still in the process of acquiring their basic crafts.
In past summers there has usually been at least one member of the company who showed exceptional acting talent. This year there was none. The repertory was also somewhat below par: The Reluctant Debutante, The Mousetrap, A Clearing in the Woods, Tartuffe, The Torchbearers, and Green Grow the Lilacs.
One was curious to see Agatha Christie's mystery The Mousetrap, because it is still running in London after six years and holds the all-time record for commercial longevity. It is a fairly neat and entertaining piece of construction, though the characters are all clear stereotypes. But it certainly ranks lower than her Witness for the Prosecution.
Arthur Laurents' A Clearing in the Woods was the most newsworthy play that Tufts staged. Laurents is a playwright who always knows exactly what he's doing. He has been widely acclaimed for his Home of the Brave, Time of the Cuckoo, and West Side Story. Yet despite a laudable production, his Clearing last year enjoyed only a brief Broadway run.
Plans are under way to mount it off-Broadway during the coming season; and the motivation is justified, for this is an important play. It is "difficult" and unorthodox, and demands unflagging concentration. There is no plot in the usual sense of the word; and the element of time is employed in a fluid and daring way.
The work revolves around an extraordinarily fascinating and complex young woman named Virginia, who is tormented by "three white nightmares," all personified on stage. Virginia undergoes before our eyes a sort of psychoanalysis, though there is fortunately none of the professional mumbo-jumbo that normally accompanies such matters. She finally manages to exorcise the tormentors; thus the title of the play not only designates its physical locale but also symbolizes the catharsis of Virginia's crowded, confused mind.
The situation might suggest the kind of triple schizophrenia recently popularized in The Three Faces of Eve; or in Burgess Meredith's controversial production of Hamlet, in which three persons depicted three facets of Hamlet's personality and spoke now successively, now simultaneously.
But Laurents has gone a step further here. Virginia lives in the present. The three girl tormentors, however, are not facets of her personality but rather three historical crises in her life. Laurents, perhaps taking a cue from Jacqueline's dream in Rolland's novel Jean Christophe, has put them all on the same temporal plane--the present--so that the three can converse and interact with themselves, with Virginia, and with the other characters in the play. This dangerous gimmick, adumbrated in Death of a Salesman, works beautifully here and the result is highly effective theatre. It is a fine play, and some day will be generally recognized as such.
Cambridge's contribution to the summer's theatrical activity derived from the two productions mounted by students in the area. The first was Anouilh's Antigone, given in the Christ Church auditorium. Anouilh's reworking of the ancient myth makes Creon a very sympathetic character. It does not seem so carefully thought out as it should be, but it has undeniable moments of great power.
Nadine Duwez handled the title role with considerable skill. The Creon of Elias Kulukundis '60 was a bit awkward. Earle Edgerton '56 directed, and others in the cast included Debbie Gayle, Mary Cass, Herb Propper, Sidney Davis, William Batchelder '59, Robert Hesse '59, and Nicholas Thompson '60.