Word: jeane
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...JEAN SCHOEN...
Poor Richard. Success defines the limits of a playwright; failure may suggest his aspirations. Jean Kerr's Poor Richard is that kind of failure. She comes to the new play still wearing the life-of-the-party grin from Mary, Mary, but something in her mind is now saying that life is not that kind of party at all, and the result is a probing but irresolute comedy. Mary, Mary was a joke-filled shopping bag that existed to be torn so that the laughs would tumble out. Poor Richard is a net hopefully cast to trap character...
...intervenes like a deux-ex-Olivetti, imposing an arbitrary happy ending without being psychologically convincing. Like most writers, poor Richard may have been an edgy, self-absorbed husband, but two people who live together for any length of time read each other, without needing the assurance of posthumous journals. Jean Kerr knows this and says as much when she has a character remark that the present generation thinks love "isn't real unless we have a fever...
Regrettably, substance is frequently sacrificed to surface. Like Eliza crossing the ice floes, the compulsive witticist in Mrs. Kerr reflects a mind too busy to stop and sink. But unlike lesser jokesmiths, Jean Kerr can always be trusted to produce the wit that is instant wisdom, as in "The affair you don't get over is the one you never...
...weekly New York National Enquirer. Turn-of-the-century postcards are Camp; so is enthusiasm for the ballet Swan Lake and the 1933 movie King Kong. Dirty movies are Camp -provided one gets no sexual kick out of them-and so are the ideas of the French playwright Jean Genet, an ex-thief and pederast who boasts about it. "Genet's statement that 'the only criterion of an act is its elegance' is virtually interchangeable, as a statement, with Wilde's 'In matters of great importance, the vital element is not sincerity, but style...