Word: beas
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...heroine (Bea Richards) is a Harlem storefront preacher, and she preaches and preaches and worries and cries. The husband she left years ago, an alcoholic trombonist, has come home to die, and that turns out to be a play-length process. The son she has cowed into seemingly submissive piety sneaks out to bars, and surreptitiously plays his father's jazz recordings. A kind of Greek chorus of Harlem harpies gibber, clown, and rummage about as if they were witnessing the fall of a discount house of Atreus...
...prevailing sound of the evening is whiny, rhetorical self-pity, though ten minutes before the final curtain Bea Richards pierces the cloudy monotony with a stormburst of tears and sun shafts of helpless laughter. But by then it is too late for the playgoer to be greatly cheered by a solitary rainbow of real passion...
...warning did not reflect any lessening of ecumenical interest on the part of Pope Paul VI, who last month authorized Augustin Cardinal Bea to set up a theological "working group" to explore the possibilities of collaboration with the World Council of Churches...
With the exception of Daniel Freudenberger as Alfieri the lawyer-narrator who seemed dimly aware that his part didn't belong in the play, the leads were uniformly splendid. Maeve Kinkead (Catherine) played a flighty coquette in the early scenes, perhaps, and Anne Bernstein (Bea) was a bit too much the sit-down, have-some-soup Molly Goldberg--but both more than redeemed themselves in the second act, which built enormously on all levels...
...bishops' letter apparently proved effective. In interviews with Bea and Frings, Paul VI agreed that the Christian Unity office would bear the major responsibility for revising the two declarations, said also that the bishops themselves could decide whether a fourth session was necessary. Nonetheless, some Roman observers feared that there might be further attempts to render the declarations ineffective...