Word: play
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Overheated from the tea, I followed a group of freshmen infiltrating into the ballroom, in search of chocolate milk and root beer. "Now, I bet YOU play the piano!" a young lady was saying. "Not even chop sticks!" (She wiggled two fingers in the air to simulate the playing of chop-sticks.) "Hmm. There must be someone here...," she said, looking around the room...
Perhaps "The Closing Door" is the right title for the new play at the Wilbur, because it does give some warning of its melodramatic nature. But "The Slowly Opening Door" would more accurately categorize this mystery drama...
Alexander Knox has written a play that lacks only a soaring bat flapping about the stage. Be it understood that there is nothing wrong in that. If a playwright can arrange to have unknown hands reach out from doors, a Big Ben-like clock strike off-stage at tense moments, and blood trickle over door sills,--if he can work all of these (and more, as in this case) into his script without causing his audience to titter at the overlarding, then hooray...
...serves the purposes of the plot well enough. The plot, by the way, concerns an unemployed man who has lost faith in himself and is hovering on the brink of insanity. His loving and loyal wife is trying to get him into an asylum for treatment when the play begins. The entire play covers only the next few hours...
Alexander Knox, in addition to having written the play, is co-starred in its along with Doris Nolan (who is also Mrs. Knox). Both are very talented actors, thought it seems that Miss Nolan gives the better performance. Of course, as the wise and kind wife, she has the more admirable part. Mr. Knox portrays the demented man as a fumbling, bewildered person rather than a maniacal killer. What in "The Closing Door" seems like underplaying by Mr. Knox, may be an authentic interpretation of a particular type of insanity, but it is not effective on the stage. Eva Condon...