Word: playlets
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...nationally famous as the bride in the Alka-Seltzer ad who lies in bed breathlessly reliving the triumph of her first home-cooked meal-particularly a single, monumental dumpling. Behind her back, the uncomfortable husband surreptitiously gulps a fizzy glassful ("Is it beginning to rain, dear?" she asks). The playlet's success depends upon the interaction of the bride's naivete with the sudden, stunned realization of the groom (Terry Kiser) that the price of love may be endless indigestion. His anguish as she innocently plans her next menus (marshmallowed meatballs and poached oysters) is a masterly mixture...
Other personality sculptors normally insist, with Guggenheim and Treleaven, that their role is supportive only, and that the candidate, not the playlet, is the thing. Occasionally there is a dissenting and disturbing voice of candor. Myron McDonald, formerly with Jack Tinker & Partners, the firm that created the widely applauded Alka-Seltzer commercials on television, has said: "We looked on the Governor [Rockefeller] almost as if he were a product like Alka-Seltzer." It had been a meeting of minds; Rockefeller's 1966 campaign manager...
...this 60-second playlet makes the point: most people do not know what to say about God any more, and perhaps they ought to know. The soft-sell message is a TV commercial, one of 50 religious spots sponsored by the Franciscan Fathers of Los Angeles' St. Francis Productions. The friars may be the most visible practitioners of this new missionary technique-their spots have been distributed to more than 700 stations. But they are by no means alone: more and more churches are turning from Sunday-morning sermonettes to brisk 30-and 60-second...
Most painful, Director Jack Viertel stretched the eighteen minute playlet to half an hour, on the theory that unhappiness slows all conversations down to 121/2 rpm. He mis-paced differently in the mask scene, which moved too fast to contain the action and the full cast...
EVER SLEEP with an elephant? Adam does in Norman Dietz' Apple Bit, the second of the three Lowell House absurdities. But, in order to follow the text from Genesis, he jilts the pachyderm before the playlet begins in favor of the more renowned Eve. After all, Eve has her points. As played by Leesa Freedman, Eve tends to do a bump and a grind when a mere bump would suffice. Nevertheless, she's an amusing sharp-tongued every-woman, who insists that her husband stand up to God like a man. And Eve favors hiding after the apple because...