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Conceived as a series of crucial moments in a woman's life. Aching Heart chronicles the coming-of-age of Fran Duffy Walsh, an Irish Brooklyn urchin who breaks off relations with her childhood guardians after her uncle, Jo-Jo forgets himself enough to kins her far too heatedly, on the night of her first date. Years later, after loneliness and marriage to a handsome neighborhood Romeo-turned-alcoholic, Fran, played by Faye Dunaway, finally 1masters the courage to face the past and reestablish contact with Jo-Jo (Bernie McInerney) in time of trouble. Music and flashback link the five...
...therein, alas, lies the difficulty--for the segments of Fran's life that unroll before us are only that, intervals between the events that have shaped here sorrows. Alfred's elliptical structure is deliberate, its patterns regular enough for the viewer to eventually catch on. Realizing he is supposed to be seeing the result of each crisis for Fran, he can reconstruct from there--but the job is difficult and distracting, and finally irritating. The very loving care and vividity lavished on these scenes have a subversive effect on the audience. Like it or not the scenes have a subversive...
...roller skates, singing and giggling over love-notes. Lonely young adulthood ("The Curse of an Aching Heart") is a parade of idiosyncratic young men and irate foreign neighbors, and the ups and downs of a love affair with a smooth young Irishman named Lugs (Terrance O'Quinn), whom Fran eventually marries. Continuity is a hard-boiled, comical best friend. "The trauma of growing up" is Jo-Jo, but the intervening years thus stylized, far from framing the slow growth of a conflict, become a string of unrelated heartaches. Fran occasionally mentions Jo-Jo's name, but between...
Most frustrating of all is the absence, in the scenes shown, of any elements that would seem to warrant such loving attention. We can see too clearly that the social encounters of Fran's single life are empty and boring: the chitchat, as the incredible trolley slides across the stage, is just that. We are convinced of the rightness of Alfred's choice of farce as a device when Fran's unacceptable, unsympathetic beaux parade through her living room and her crazy German neighbors scream from upstairs; these scenes and characters compose the essentials of farce, so much so that...
PERHAPS THE PLAY suffered from the weakening of its original concept as a string of disparate moments. Since Curse's first, highly successful opening in Chicago two years ago, Alfred has added a few long scenes and written in the only direct confrontations the script contains--Fran and Jo-Jo's single explosive moment and, later, her meeting with her aunt, which sparks a long talk over old times. But rather than fleshing out the story, the additions sit uneasily and discontinuities are all too evident. What pleasure, nostalgic or dramatic, can we glean from Fran and Aunt Gert...