Word: haras
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FIVE PLAYS (473 pp.)-John O'Hara-Random House...
George Bernard Shaw's splendid custom of appending argumentative prefaces to his plays-and, in a few instances, of dangling a play from an especially grand preface-has been taken up by John O'Hara, who between novels and short stories has had a largely unrequited hankering for the theater. True, O'Hara has written only one preface for five plays, but that one rings with large-spirited ill will. Some of his plays, says the author, might have reached Broadway "if I had been willing to take writing lessons from directors, but I know...
Dead Centers. Of the collection's first play. The Farmer's Hotel (which also appeared as a short novel), the author says that Rodgers and Hammerstein might have liked it, but Joshua Logan nixed the project. Logan must have been wrong, suggests O'Hara, because a stock-company production of the play moved the Fishkill, N.Y., Rotary Club to laugh, cry and call for the author. Later, "a prominent playwright" became interested, "but he wanted to rewrite the play and I did not want to reveal to him that it is an allegory, very tightly written...
...whom the author has deep sympathy, but to whom nothing happens. In Sun he is a crippled doctor who sees the disintegration of a neighboring family. He is a novelist's device, like Fitzgerald's Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby, the reporter Jim Malloy, O'Hara's man-on-the-sidelines in Butter field 8 and Sermons and Soda-Water. In the tighter structure of a play, he is cumbrous and distracting...
...remaining plays are merely curtain lowerers. Veronique fails to revolve around a problem only writers can care about: Should a playwright write profitable comedies or unprofitable deep stuff? The Way It Was is a timid venture back to Butter field 8 country, intended to be a musical. O'Hara's long account in the preface of why Irving Berlin turned it down is almost as embarrassing as the moraine of first drafts, letters to the editor and encysted insults that Norman Mailer shored against his ruins in Advertisements For Myself...