Word: phil
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...MERT AND PHIL. Flawed in craft but spunky in spirit, Anne Burr's unflinching drama dared playgoers to face the corruption of the flesh and the death of love...
...that Jonah or Adam and Eve were historical and that Jesus turned water into wine. Osing's views proved too much for his conservative parishioners. "The Lutheran Church has always been based on the Bible," explains Phil Beck, production manager of a local paint company and the church's Sunday-school superintendent. "If you start questioning it, where do you stop? If I have to have that much education to sit down and understand Genesis, then why did God ever let Luther put it in the people's language? At what point do I throw the whole mad mess...
...well, too Hollywood. They were right. The first draft of Writer William Goldman's script was excellent in parts, but generally superficial. "It read like a Henny Youngman joke-book of one-liners," Bernstein complained to a friend. "Harry Rosenfeld [Post metropolitan editor] came out looking like Phil Silvers, and Ben Bradlee became Walter Pidgeon. It was just too shallow." So Bernstein and Esquire Contributing Editor Nora Ephron, his sometime roommate, have rewritten large chunks of the script...
...music has never been an easy profession for women. Recognition and glamour are common enough, but women looking for artistic control and financial leverage are usually thwarted. The Crystals and the Ronettes were high on the pop charts in the early '60s, but Phil Spector, multifaceted rock tycoon, wrote the lyrics, produced the records and pocketed most of the profits. In the '60s the men who sold pop music saw women as petulant screamers (Lesley Gore) or filigreed folkies (Judy Collins). Occasionally, women defied the image makers. Janis Joplin and Grace Slick escaped briefly from San Francisco psychedelia...
...play, then, simply lubricious Erskine Caldwell country shipped north? Not really. Estelle Parsons' magnificently wrung-out performance as Mert would alone save it from that. The easy and obvious charge to bring against Mert and Phil is bad taste, but it, like beauty, is often in the eye of the beholder. More than likely, the play and Joseph Papp are being lambasted for presenting subjects that audiences deeply dread facing: the corruption of the flesh, the death of love, and growing old in bleak utter loneliness. There may be too little craft in Mert and Phil, but there...