Word: playlet
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Rossellini pedals off, for an hour or more, through a dozen or so takes of the cow playlet. As she waits at rest for the camera to roll, her resemblance to her mother, Actress Ingrid Bergman, is powerfully clear: the wide cheekbones, the astonishing directness, the serene impression of physical and moral strength. In motion, as she smiles and gives the flower to the cowherd, she flashes the life and openness that were, she says, the unforgettable traits of her father, Film Director Roberto Rossellini. These characteristics are not physical. It does not seem especially important to catalogue her face...
...about the theater." He is still unhappy with some fellow showfolk, and has now placed an ad in the London Times calling for formation of a writers' "fighting unit" to combat unfriendly reviewers. The group will be a "British playwrights' Mafia," according to Osborne, who penned a playlet describing their imaginary first meeting. "Critics are a dissembling, dishonest, contemptible race of men," says the group's godfather-played by Osborne, naturally. "Asking a working writer what he thinks about critics is like asking a lamppost what it feels about dogs...
Each of the playlets is a slightly shell-shocked encounter between visitors from outside city-states (New York, Philadelphia, London, Chicago) and Los Angeles, capital of the palm fringe of Western civilization. In playlet No. 1, two divorced ex-writers get together to discuss dividing the spoils: their 17-year-old daughter. Hannah (Tammy Grimes) has the true verbal grit of New York City and is a senior editor at Newsweek. William (George Grizzard) basks in Cal ifornia as a contented Polo Lounge liz ard. They both shoot from the quip. Al though William is defensive, he has the punchiest...
...Playlet No. 2, the most hilarious of the four, is one of those flirtations with sin and the fear of its consequences which has given Simon a particular hold on the fantasies of his prevailingly middleclass, middle-aged audiences. Mar vin (Jack Weston) has come West to celebrate the bar mitzvah of his nephew and been given the surprise present of a blonde hooker (Leslie Easterbrook). After a night of amnesiac pleasure, Mar vin wakes to find this houri, a vodka overachiever, comatose...
...mimes the frustrations of a man lost in the desert who is variously tempted by water bottles that elude his grasp and ropes that foil his attempts to hang himself. The character is a kind of vaudeville Sisyphus, and one can thank Beckett for the small favor that the playlet lasts only ten minutes. Not I lasts 15. It is the seemingly final verbal spasm of a woman of 70 (Tandy) who recounts fragments of her life and concludes that even her suffering does not add up to much of anything. Only the woman's spotlighted mouth...