The Theater: Laughs That Bleed Truth

With the attrition of metropolitan dailies, the power to influence Manhattan theatergoers lies largely in the hands of one man, the drama critic of the New York Times. Last week a negative notice by Clive Barnes, acted upon in scandalous haste by Co-Producers Joseph Kipness and Larry Kasha, sundered the life of a fine comedy, Oliver Hailey’s Father’s Day, after one performance.

While he relishes his celebrity status, Barnes worries about this degree of power. To mitigate it, he customarily bends over backward to find something to praise even when the show is arrant flapdoodle. This time he could not summon up anything good to say about the play; nor did he have a pleasant word for Hailey’s previous work, Who’s Happy Now?, a hilarious Oedipal farce (TIME, Nov. 28, 1969). The reason may lie in the nature of comedy, which is the most indigenous of dramatic forms. Barnes was born and reared in England, and while he likes to think that he understands American comedy, it frequently leaves him nonplused.

In any event, the ultimate fate of a play depends on the producer. David Merrick has proved that conclusively by keeping plays alive that every critic has panned. As co-producers of the smash musical Applause, Kipness and Kasha are rolling in money. Kipness is also a restaurant tycoon who owns Pier 52, Hawaii Kai and Dinty Moore’s. Yet he and Kasha cravenly folded their theatrical tents in a single night and silently skulked away. Following is an account of the play they killed.

Married couples are as free as fencers. In the thrust and parry, each partner pinks the other, helping to drain away the anger and frustration that might otherwise fester within and poison the self. But the divorced person shadowboxes with a vivid phantom, the past. He or she is bound to an enemy that cannot be hit or flattened—memory. For the divorced, recollection is impacted pain. Regrets, bitterness, envy, hate stalk the mind.

To embody this in the heart of a comedy is a tricky feat, but Oliver Hailey has pulled it off wonderfully in Father’s Day, and he has achieved a remarkable purgation as well. Here is an evening in the theater suffused with stinging, gut-aching laughter.

Gawky Swan. In Act I a sisterhood of suffering assembles, and more verbal feline ferocity has not gone zinging across a Broadway stage since Clare Boothe Luce wrote The Women. Three divorcees have arranged for their ex-husbands to take the children for an outing in honor of the day. Louise (Brenda Vaccaro) is an earthy exactress with a tongue like a wood file. Marian (Marian Seldes) is a gawky swan of a woman who can deliver lines with the edgily lethal politesse of a Boston blueblood. Estelle (Jennifer Salt) is the quintessential waif, an orphan who married an orphan. The three drink, and discuss sex in a way that shows they have nothing to learn from Dr. Reuben, or “J”.

In Act II the husbands appear. With the men present, the atmosphere is less claustrophobic and, if possible, even funnier. One has remarried and another is about to; the third is happy with a bisexual assortment—including his exwife. The men have pretty much dropped their vendetta with the past. While the women are more vitriolic, they seem, at play’s end, sadder and more vulnerable, rather like Chekhov’s three sisters, to whom a closing mock-reference is made.

Father’s Day is a very tough, serious comedy. It has a Manhattan locale, tempo and lingo and might be as perplexing to a middle-class Midwesterner (the Midwest takes a caustic drubbing in the play) as to a Briton. Hailey uses humor as an offensive weapon, much as Albee does in Virginia Woolf.

The defensive use of humor is best exemplified by Neil Simon. It is self-deprecatory humor designed to defuse aggression and guard the self from hurt. Hailey is not like that. He never lets the cascade of laughs blur his characters’ profiles or wash away the humanity of their torment. His laughs bleed truth.

Brenda Vaccaro and Marian Seldes have been turning in solid, beautiful jobs of acting season after season. They have never been better than they are in this play. Actor-Director Donald Moffat shapes scenes with style, tact, grace and firmness. As for Hailey, 38, his work ought to still the chant that there are no new American playwrights of note. With scant weeks left in the current theater year, only a return of Edward Albee to his top form can prevent Father’s Day from being the best American play of the season.