Word: plays
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...mate on Yale's 41 yard line. The receiver, in trying to lateral, threw the ball forward. This player in turn dashed down the field and was chased out of bounds on the Yale 21 yard line, but the referee in bringing the ball into the field of play put it down on the 16. And not one of the infractions was called...
...world, taxed too far, rise up and destroy their oppressors, whether neighborhood bullies or world-famed Reichsführers. Put as blithely as Shaw puts it, it is a cheering idea. The trouble is that, while it makes The Gentle People a likable fable, it makes it an absurd play. Humorous mood and melodramatic plot refuse to jell. Murder is usually a fairly serious business, and murder conceived and carried out by two good-natured fishermen should be fairly agonizing. Instead it becomes a piece of hanky-panky, awkward, grotesque, unreal...
Short on inhibitions, The Primrose Path at its rosiest is all downhill and no brakes. Were all the characters as rowdy and ribald as Grandma, the play would blow the audience into the middle of next year. But the rest of the family, if unconventional, are given to normal moments of joy and sorrow. After mixing Grandma's outrageous antics with her son-in-law's gruesome suicide and her granddaughter's rocky romance, The Primrose Path fails to come off as well as it might. For, though humor and pathos make the best of friends, realism...
Though no acknowledgment of source is made, The Primrose Path strikes many a playgoer as a dramatization of Victoria Lincoln's popular novel, February Hill (1934). First mentioned for production by Sam H. Harris in 1935, the play went unproduced for three years, after a Fall River, Mass, woman, charging that February Hill maligned members of her family, sued Author Lincoln for $100,000. So far the case has not come to trial...
Producer Abbott apparently believes that the impending suit will not affect the play, for the family of February Hill is named Harris and lives in Fall River, whereas the family of The Primrose Path is named Wallace and lives in "a small town near Buffalo...