Word: celia
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Poetry Reading: San Cornish, Elizabeth Fenton. Celia Wilfong, Cambridge Street Artists' Cooperative, 1287 Cambridge St. 8, April 23. Free...
...ante. The scene is now the neo-Honeymooners apartment of Celia and her husband Phil (Simon Oakland), a retired master sargeant. Swede (Conrad Bain), an old army buddy, has just arrived and the two men are up to their elbows in cans of beer and talk of the army, the fights and other things that generally just aren't what they once used to be. Celia, a childless, tired woman, her hair--as described by her own mother--a gaudy "change-of-life red," tries to force the conversation to include herself. She gossips about the neighbors, laments the marriage...
...talky self-analysis of considerable pathos. This makes for a jarring discrepancy of mood without any compensating illumination of meaning. Act I is fun and naughty games. In it, Philip ends up in bed with a Venus's-fly-trap of a girl. His fiancée Celia (Jane Asher) pairs up with a cynical aphorist out of early Aldous Huxley. This hedonist with a literate leer acquires luxuriant narcissistic finesse from the performance of Victor Spinetti...
...Philip seems to personify a biblical adage in reverse. He cannot love his neighbor (or his fiancée) like himself because he does not love himself. Celia leaves him, which makes good sense but rather flat drama. What redeems the evening is McCowen's acting. He has a feel for the role that is as sensitive as a safecracker's fingertips. At one moment he is the bemused absent-minded professor, at another the twinkling champion of verbal pingpong, and at still another, an anguished human with a parched heart...