Word: boarders
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...Birthday Party seems to possess a more vivid symbolic imagery and a greater sense of motion than the other two plays. Like Waiting for Godot, although in a totally ominous sense, this is a play about waiting. Stanley (Robert Phalen) is a piano-playing recluse hiding out as a boarder in a small provincial town. The landlady (Betty Field) has a letch for him, and her husband (Ray Fry) treats him as a son. Stanley has apparently betrayed some secret organization...
...request for equal time comes from Emma Wallop, a small-town Midwestern widow and retired nurse who wakes one day to discover that her former boarder, Randy Rivers, has published a bestselling novel entitled Don't Look Now, Medusa. A tin-plated Spoon River Anthology, it has as its main character a small-town Midwestern landlady, like Emma herself, given to dislocated clichés and malapropisms...
...father was a Bible-Beltish tile setter who never drank or swore. My stepfather was a logger who gambled, drank, fought, and did just about everything else. They were total opposites, and I had to find my own way." He found it one night when he heard a fellow boarder at a Los Angeles rooming house playing jazz piano. "He seemed to be having so much fun I just flipped," recalls Mason. Thus ended his ambition to become an insurance actuary; he went to Oklahoma City College as a music major...
...unfortunate scheme of writing what seem to be fragments of separate novels about each member of the family and then cobbling the pieces together. There are simply too many pieces; the family includes, besides Whipple and his wife, three teen-age sons and a daughter, a young girl boarder and a cat. The human characters are led through the loss of virginity or an equivalent test of patience; the cat is honored with a long, agonizing and very well-written death scene...
...scene of the second act is contentless. But the lines, and the characters who speak them, achieve credibility and real beauty at the same time. "Baby, if you had a dog, I'd love the dog," says Moe Axelrod, the family satisfied businessman with little concern for family or boarder, to Hennie, whom he loves. Uncle Morty, a self-heritage, describes his success by saying, "Every Jew and Wop in the shop eats my bread and behind my back says, 'a sonofabitch.' I started from a poor boy who worked on an ice wagon for two dollars a week...