Word: playgoer
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Never Too Late, by Sumner Arthur Long. There's a Ford in many a playgoer's future-Paul Ford. Ford looks rather like an elephant that has had its trunk bobbed...
Tchin-Tchin is a strange and oddly affecting play in which an Italo-American contractor and a proper Englishwoman are thrown into each other's company because their respective spouses are having an affair. Margaret Leighton and Anthony Quinn touch the playgoer's nerve ends, crazybones, and heart strings with deceptive ease and authority...
...lawyer with a festering case of Korean combat fatigue (Jack Kelly), an aging poet-turned-furniture-dealer (Walter Abel) and his wife (Carmen Mathews) who has a Ponce de Leon complex. From 1 a.m. to dawn, these characters soliloquize, harmonize (around a stage-center piano), and bend the playgoer's ear without touching his heart or prickling his nerves. They all seem to be high on bootleg rhetoric ("You drink a cup of sunlight, you're immortal...
...trapped bystanders and finish as guilty fellow victims. In the long and lacerating annals of family fights on stage, there has been nothing quite like Virginia Woolf's mortal battle of the sexes for sheer nonstop grim-gay savagery. The human heart is not on view, but the playgoer will know that he has seen human entrails...
After that, the play is sapped by incredibility. Albee asks the playgoer to believe that the warring couple actually kept up a pretense about a nonexistent son for 21 years-having previously suggested various possible reasons for this neurotic myth, such as that Martha's father didn't like her. Coming after two acts of cascading turbulence, this plot resolution is woefully inadequate and incongruous, rather like tracing the source of Niagara to a water pistol. There are other weaknesses. The play is needlessly long (3¼ hours), repetitious, slavishly, sometimes superficially Freudian, and given to trite thoughts...