Word: attics
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Toys in the Attic. Lillian Hellman's new play about a weak ne'er-do-well slaps a lethargic Broadway season into awareness, is written with power and insight...
Toys in the Attic (by Lillian Hellman) slaps a slumped, lethargic theatrical season into awareness. The reason is not just that Toys has a sense of tautness, insight and power; it also has a pervasive sense of playwriting. It constitutes a dramatic journey, with a destination, rather than a mere series of vivid theatrical way stations. And it so clearly reaches its destination that its finest moments are its concluding ones. This alone is outstanding in a Broadway theater world that, even when it knows where it is going, too often about-faces when it gets there...
Laid in New Orleans, Toys in the Attic pivots on 34-year-old Julian Berniers, a weak, likable ne'er-do-well who has been protectively kept going by two adoring old-maid sisters who toil and stint for him. Recently he has married an odd, unbalanced rich girl who is possessively happy with him only when they are hard up. Suddenly and mysteriously, Julian manages to get hold of a lot of money. He comes home, cocky and excited, to fling money about, shower everyone with presents, give his sisters passages to Europe and a paid-off mortgage...
...wearing a new hearing aid and spectacles that the old folks' home had given him, Bally told reporters his eerie story. Back in 1910, Bally, a 15-year-old orphan, was shipped off to Farmer Kolkman's place to work for a bed in the attic and 2.50 guilders (65?) a week. In those days the guilder went far, and young Bally never complained. By the time the first World War broke out, he was too deaf to be called up, and since his eyesight had also begun to fail, he soon stopped keeping track...
Toys in the Attic, by Lillian Hellman in a Tennessee Williams vein, had Boston audiences/coughing and ho-humming through a talky first act, but soon caught their attention with enough incest, adultery, miscegenation and fornication to keep a three-toed sloth awake for a month. Starring Maureen Stapleton, Irene Worth and Jason Robards Jr.., it is the first original play in nine years by Dramatist Hellman (The Little Foxes, The Children's Hour). Wrote the Boston Record's Elliot Norton: "She has written wisely, often wittily, and her point of view is provocative. But the basic story seemed...