Word: gardens
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...damned if I'll believe anyone lives in a place called "The Garden of Allah...
Even Tom Wolfe, the country boy from North Carolina, should have known better. Everyone lived at the Garden of Allah Hotel-everyone, that is, who was part of the Hollywood elite in the old days when the town still managed to be wacky in the grand manner. Through the late, intoxicated '20s and '30s, the Garden was more house party than hotel. Robert Benchley was resident clown; John Barrymore kept a bicycle there so as not to waste drinking time walking between the separate celebrations in the sprawling, movie-Spanish villas. Woollcott, Hemingway, Brice, Olivier, Welles, Bogart, Dietrich...
...dangers of presenting plays that no one ever presents is that you may find out that there is a very good reason for not presenting them. Twice this season Tufts Arena Theatre has made this embarrassing discovery. Their production this week, The Chalk Garden by Enid Bagnold, is a lot less esoteric than their last two shows, but it is also a much better play...
...Chalk Garden" is the story of a struggle between life and sterility which is carried on at two levels. On one level the struggle is between the 70-year-old Mrs. St. Maugham and the woman she hires as a companion for her sixteen-year-old granddaughter, Laurel. On the other level, the struggle is between the companion, Miss Madrigal, and Mrs. St. Maugham's old, and now infirmed, butler, Mr. Pinkbell, who never appears on stage. Since the companion is at the focus of both of these quarrels, it is on the strength of the performance of Miss Madrigal...
...symbolism of "Chalk Garden" depends on the fact that for most of the play the two quarrels are equivalent. Madrigal and Pinkbell dispute for control of Mrs. St. Maugham's chalk garden. Pinkbell has always had control over it, and when Madrigal arrives she completely inverts all of Pinkbell's commands and shows signs of being able to bring life out of the almost sterile soil. Similarly, Miss Madrigal changes the way in which Laurel is being brought up. Laurel ran away to her grandmother on the night before her mother remarried. However, Miss Madrigal sees in the mother...