The Theater: New Plays in Manhattan, Oct. 4, 1954

All Summer Long (adapted by Robert Anderson from a novel by Donald Wetzel) tells, on the surface, at least, a very different story from Playwright Anderson’s Tea and Sympathy (the longest-run dramatic play currently on Broadway). It chronicles a summer in a Midwestern household which proves a particularly disturbing summer for the family’s twelve-year-old son. Young Willie at times achieves a new awareness of some of the facts (and fictions) of life, and at other times has awareness thrust upon him.

He lives in a house whose physical foundations are being eroded by the river that flows by it, which no one in the family bothers to do anything about. The family’s personal relations stand also in need of attention. Willie’s father (Ed Begley) blusters from not knowing how to deal with people; his good-looking married sister is too cheaply self-centered to want even a family of her own; his sweet, bumbling mother goes around wearing rose-colored blinkers. Only his crippled older brother (John Kerr) has feeling enough for the kid to help him build a crude retaining wall; but it crumbles with the first storm, and the family, at the end, is forced to flee the house.

Playwright Anderson has written of a home menaced from without through lack of concern, and from within through lack of feeling. The play might almost be called Tea and Apathy. For, what with its sensitive boy—stupidly misunderstood, innocently misunderstanding—and with its unhappy brother in the same ministering-angel role as the housemaster’s unhappy wife, there are decided inner correspondences with Tea and Sympathy. But where, in Tea and Sympathy, a bewildered boy was caught up violently in action, it is of inaction that he is the victim here. And deprived of melodrama, Playwright Anderson is driven into sentimentality. One of the things that Willie (engagingly played by Clay Hall) has thrust upon him is an undue aura of gallantry and affirmation. On the other hand, he has none of the imagination and humor of such another sensitive and bewildered child as the heroine of The Member of the Wedding.

The play’s other characters are handled justly enough, and for the most part well played. But the play, however honestly intended or now and then effectively written, drifts to no end like its people, and holds together little better than its wall. It tries hard to pierce to something rooted, but its author gives an impression of living beyond his insight.

Home Is the Hero (by Walter Macken) treats of an Irish household, and of the father’s return to it after five years in prison for killing a man in a brawl. Paddo O’Reilly returns home an even worse bully than he went away: he has a new sense of guilt that makes him flagellate others instead of himself, and an old will to dominate that soon has him trying to upset everyone’s plans and destroy everyone’s happiness. Only at the end does Paddo—or rather, Playwright Macken—relent: in a most ignominious victory of plot over character, the bully suddenly decides to clear out.

Playwright Macken acts Paddo with a good deal of skill. But instead of exploring Paddo with a scalpel, he merely keeps coming down on him like a sledge on an anvil, while his victims’ endless denunciations swell matters into an anvil chorus.