Word: ferroni
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Secret Room (by Robert Turney) is the story of Leda Ferroni, a mental victim of Nazi torture, who goes-presumably cured-to live with an American family. Before the family catches on, she has turned the kids against their mother, planned a kidnapping, committed one murder, attempted a second. The play might have been a fascinating character study or a menacing yarn. But Leda is bungled and the story is a bore...
Robert Turney's drama shows how Leda Ferroni, the refugee, is led to murder and finally to total insanity in her unscrupulous struggle to keep her past a secret and to make her future happy. The key to this happiness is the possession of a baby, but psychologically Ferroni is unable to have her own. So she goes about winning the affection of the two little girls while posing as a friend of the family. It is all quite effective, and the secret room itself, whether it is intended as a symbol of Miss Ferroni's hidden past...
Some of the writing is awkward, and there is very little development in any of the characters except Miss Ferroni and one of the children. Not that there isn't plenty of action, and changes in the temper of the relationships, but nearly everybody seems pretty much the same at the end of the play as they were at the beginning. Turney also plays a very irritating trick on his audience by having the mother (Frances Dee, a capable actress from Hollywood) apparently, murdered at the end of Act II, only to reveal in Act III that she was just...
...that the play is missing a consistency of emphasis on some one central theme. "The Secret Room" is essentially a melodrama. But at moments during the first two acts it seems to be aiming in the direction of a psychological study, and once, with some references to Miss Ferroni's aristocratic background, some special implications are thrown in. The producers evidently realize that this is confusing, as an entire new first act is to be put in early next week and should make a substantial indifference...
...Among other women in his life: Revolutionist Angelica Balabanoff; Barmaid Rachele Guidi, his common-law wife (later legal) for ten years; the brilliant exiled Jewess, Margherita Sarfatti; the sisters Maria and Francesca Ferroni; and slim, brown-eyed Claretta Petacci, daughter of a former Vatican surgeon...