Word: eggheaded
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Egghead (by Molly Kazan) is a contemporary play about a not-very-contemporary-minded professor. Hank Parson is full of high-minded intolerances, grants his seemingly dumb wife the freedom of thought to agree with him, chants ancient war cries while ignoring current wars. Then the FBI comes investigating a favorite former student of his, a brilliant Negro. Certain that the student is not a Communist and equally certain why he is being smeared as one, Parson rushes to his defense and brings him to the college to speak. All too soon, by way of his wife's sleuthing...
...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...
...ended last week the four-month mental marathon that had accomplished the transformation of an egghead into a TV darling (TIME, Feb. 11 et seq.). By failing to name Belgium's King Baudouin, Van Doren lost the game on NBC's Twenty One to Mrs. Vivienne Nearing, a blonde barrister who had tied him for two weeks running. The loss shaved Van Doren's take from $143,000 to $129,000, still the largest prize ever awarded on any single program. Income taxes will slice this sum plus the annual $4,500 he gets as an English...