Up at Agassiz, there is a man named Earle Edgerton acting in a play called The Moon is Blue. You ought to go see him.
The Moon is Blue belongs to a genre of its own; it is comedy that hovers close to the bedroom without ever quite making its way inside. One might say that the present production totters rather than hovers, but the point remains; it is very funny stuff. Surprisingly enough, the funny stuff is concocted with the most hackneyed characters imaginable: a personable young man of high principles, a fresh-faced ingenue, a jaded roue, and a belligerent Irish cop. The plot is too complicated to discuss, and wouldn't be worth it anyway; the humor derives from epigram and situation.
In this instance, humor is very nearly the exclusive province of the aforementioned Mr. Edgerton, who plays the roue. Granted, the role is not a very taxing one, but Edgerton delivers all there is in it. The quality which lifts him so far above his colleagues is timing. He is an actor of some experience, and realizes that the funniest line can be ruined with poor timing--an axiom which the others demonstrate from time to time.
These others are Elias Kulukundis, Sally Ryder and Herbert Propper. Kulukundis, playing the personable young man, is personable; he is also very nearly immobile. He is fine when he can be bellicose, but by and large he makes this frothiest of plays as ponderous as possible.
Miss Ryder, though history will remember her as the girl with the aquamarine eyelids, is better. She has the appropriate freshness of face and figure, except for the eyelids, and is good at times; like Kulukundis, she is better at remonstrance than banter. But there came a time when her voice recalled the sound a tape recorder makes when played backwards at a high speed; fresh, perhaps, but unsettling.
It must be said in her favor that she got better as she went along, except for a sag in the last scene. But like Edgerton's, her part has a great deal of fun in it; not enough came across. When she was alone on the stage with Kulukundis, there were times when only the happy few who had seen the play elsewhere could have suspected that the lines were supposed to be funny.
Propper, who played her father, did not distinguish himself during his brief appearance.
Even the worst of the acting surpassed the technical end of things by a good deal. The door kept opening mysteriously, the telephone seemed to ring somewhere out in the quadrangle, brandy bottles turned out to be full of some bright crimson fluid. A bottle ran dry early in the second act, so that Kulukundis had to pour and drink from an empty glass. One would expect that in a production which began twenty-two minutes late, these things might have been set right.
The technical troubles extend even to the actors. Kulukundis's kisses and Propper's right hooks were equally unconvincing. As for the set, I gather that it was the work of several hands, and therefore hold my fire, except to mention that it seemed that Miss Ryder did her cooking and dishwashing in Kulukundis's bedroom.
Edgerton, in short, is fighting against fearful odds, with the intermittent assistance of Miss Ryder. He has a good time doing it, and this spectacle may be worth the price of admission.
