Word: egghead
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...half a dozen U.S. symphonies, an RCA Victor recording contract. In the in-between years, when the glamour of being a teen-age virtuoso wore off, he dropped almost from sight on the community concert circuit. By preference he steered away from the showy, romantic pieces ("I was an egghead about what I played"). A year ago he went to Europe, scored a noisy success with the London critics...
...bumptious streak of humorless selfimportance: "I am the most serious man of our age." Early this year, the most serious man of our age proved that life can be dangerous for an Outsider inadvertently caught indoors (TIME, March 4). His girl friend's father nearly scrambled the egghead with a horsewhip after bursting in on the cozy couple with some gaslit stage dialogue: "Aha, Wilson, the game...
...Egghead is almost always interesting and with Karl Maiden and Lloyd Richards as the Liberal and the Communist, rewardingly well acted. Again and again it vitalizes the issues at the same time that-with small talk and small children, dinner-party fiascos and marital spats-it humanizes the atmosphere. What it does not do-what a message play so seldom can do-is to create flesh-and-blood characters who really seem to shape and chart their own lives...
...reason in The Egghead is a matter of plot. Basically-with its tale of a cocksure know-it-all who is being royally had and is only saved by his bird-brained wife (Phyllis Love)-the plot is a staple of artificial comedy and farce. But here the tricks and artifices are applied, with considerable loss in credibility, to something serious and real. Moreover, as anything but a purely comic butt, the professor seems just a little too wet behind the ears and behind the times...
...action for argument. This means a drop in dramatic force. Thus, when the student unequivocally assures his worried benefactor that he is not a Communist, he seems morally much more horrifying than when, later on, he gives all the reasons why he is one. In the last act The Egghead becomes a lively enough symposium, but in any creative sense it really ceases to be a play...