The Theatre: Everybody Loves Eileen

Everybody Loves Opal (by John Patrick) is a try at sick comedy that merely manages to be unwell. A bizarre trio of crooks consisting of a satanic professor with one lung (Donald Harron), a roly-poly jester (Stubby Kaye), and a bunny (Brenda Vaccaro) who looks nude in clothes, decide to insure a zanily beatific spinster junk collector named Opal Kronkie (Eileen Heckart) for $30,000, and then murder her for the insurance. The would-be killers drop an entire ceiling on Opal’s head, try to run her down in a car, and finally soak her junk-cluttered room in kerosene, but Opal is not obliterated, or even particularly fazed. Her infectious good-heartedness cures the unwholesome three of money fever, and eventually everyone is innocently tossing greenbacks around like confetti.

As Opal, Actress Heckart is almost as good as a box-office refund. Whether she is brewing her own brand of dehydrated tea from 17 teabags strung side by side on a clothesline, or vaulting through space to pounce on someone’s stiff neck with a chiropractical jerk, or cheerily offering to chase the bats out of the guest bedroom, Eileen Heckart is wildly and wistfully amusing. Garbed in the remnants of remnants, she is an endearing clown-waif in the classic Chaplin tradition.

Jo Mielziner’s set is a comic masterpiece of interior decrepitude, a kind of termite’s vision of heaven, dominated by a rotting floor-to-ceiling stairway, a fit home, as one character puts it, for “the bride of Dracula.” The set speaks, even if the script only stutters.