Word: playing
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...dialogue awakened cafe scents of strong smoke, dry cognac and refracted thought ("Suppose you die and find out that the dead are only the living playing at being dead")And the story of an intellectual mamma's boy Communist up against a tough, cynical but gallant revolutionary was shot through with Marxist analysis. With such qualities Jean-Paul Sartre's Crime of Passion seemed an unlikely play for TV. But viewers in the New York area saw it last week, in a full-length and absorbing production, well acted by a cast that included Claude Dauphin and Betsy...
...Sartre piece (seen on Broadway ten years ago as Red Gloves) was the latest Play of the Week, eighth in an admirable series on New Jersey's WNTA-TV. The series presents a different taped play every week (six evenings, plus Sunday afternoons), usually relying on past Broadway productions and topnotch Broadway casts...
...Sartre's Communist theme would have chilled most network programmers, WNTA's earlier choices would have set their teeth to chattering. So far, The Play of the Week has dealt with such themes as drunkenness and sexuality in a priest (Graham Greene's The Power and the Glory), sterility and infidelity (John Steinbeck's Burning Bright), infanticide (Medea, with Judith Anderson), and clerical tyranny (Paul Vincent Carroll's The White Steed). Says Producer David Susskind: "We have none of those pernicious and aggravating conditions and taboos that you get everywhere else on TV." Most memorable...
...Play of the Week's effort to wake up viewers seems on the way to commercial success. It has attracted seven sponsors, who cover 70% of expenses. The average play costs only $40,000 to produce, partly because players take relatively low salaries ($750 for stars). Eventually, NTA plans to syndicate the taped plays to stations around the country...
Five Finger Exercise (by Peter Shaffer) starts off with the look of one more mousy English country-house play, with the sound of one more reminiscent and easily resolvable tune. But it becomes increasingly cat-and-mousy, with a tune that introduces subtle dissonances, ominous themes, crashing chords. The Harrington family is slightly non-U and wholly nonunified. Father (Roland Culver) is a self-made furniture manufacturer, all the more defensively crass and philistine because of his contemptuously snobbish, culture-climbing wife (Jessica Tandy) and his contemptuous, muddled mamma's lap dog of a son (Brian Bedford...