Word: arden
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Desi Arnaz is back, this time as executive producer of The Mothers-in-Law (NBC). Eve Arden and Kaye Ballard are squabbling next-door neighbors whose children wind up marrying each other. Eve, best known as Our Miss Brooks, is one of the few comediennes in the business who earns her laugh track. Kaye, who plays an Italian housewife, is a versatile actress, but she tends to overdo to the point that the show may be boycotted by Frank Sinatra's Anti-Defamation League. Producer Arnaz thinks he has a winner. "It's not sophisticated," he says...
...Arden and Kaye Ballard square off in the family circle. Premiere...
While we're at it, I want to thank Betty Grable for the wonderful job she is now doing on Broadway, and for her 15 months on the road earlier. I want to thank Eve Arden for those three months in Chicago last year, and Carole Cook for the Australian tour, and Dora Bryan for replacing Miss Martin so superbly in London, and Martha Raye for her stand this spring on Broadway, and Bibi Osterwald for her brief stands on Broadway...
Another thing about Arden. He began his professional life as an architect, and in the course of that career he seems to have worked all calculated design out of his system. As a playwright, he scatters dramatic climaxes around as if they were props. His last act contains at least three brilliant curtains, as if he couldn't decide when to end his play, and ended it three times just for good measure. Not only that; his second act goes on forever, and some of his poetic dialect is redolent of the absurd sailor-talk O'Neill wrote when...
...reason for all this unconventional behavior is that Arden is not making points, but people. He has nothing to prove and nothing to sell, and therefore he doesn't have to manipulate his characters into demonstrating a proof or making a sale. They are there in the stark altogether in order to make us laugh, and we laugh because they are disgusting and hypocritical, not because they are airing the writer's gags. And when any playwright gives his characters as much free reign as Arden does, he is bound to overwrite, as Arden most certainly does...