Word: plotlessness
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...power to make one live episodes which could not happen; Zachary Scott's Dimitrios is more smooth, and more thoroughly lousey than an international weasel could be. Each character plays his part with a light hearted desperation one can revel in for an hour and a half of a plotless day Escape...
...second part is McHugh's A Minute's Wait. McHugh is less well-known than O'Connor and Lady Gregory, and his play is the slightest of the three. It is a plotless romp around a rural railroad station, and can best be described as fifteen Irish Alec Guinesses, turned loose in front of a camera. Good fun, and a fine contrast to the somber opening of the final piece...
...sketch scene where mehitabel, as a dramatic-school tyro, suddenly gives the hot-jazz treatment to Shakespeare-Shinbone Alley is attractive show business. And Eartha Kitt. with her feline grace and mannered charm, is frequently mehitabelish, and at the worst gives Kitt for cat. But the show's plotless proceedings have little episodic lift, the score is unexciting and the dancing dated, and Eddie Bracken's archy seems understandably forlorn...
...could be said to be jealous was Shakespeare; Henderson concedes the Beard's criticism of the Bard to have been often "provocative, unilateral, unjust, savage and false." And he credits Shakespeare with teaching Shaw "the technique of ultra-naturalism in dialogue," just as Moliere schooled him in "the plotless conversation piece," and Dickens showed him how to exaggerate characters "far beyond verisimilitude...
Though the plotless play is overlong and sometimes cumbrous and clumsy, these weaknesses-as not often in O'Neill -have their value. The repetitions, for example, are in character, as coming from broken-willed people with a neurotic need for the solace or savagery of words. The plotlessness is the measure of their impotence. The play's language-merely straightforward and blunt, except where the self-dramatizing old actor and the word-conscious young writer empurple it -has in the theater far more trenchancy than the half-poetized prose so frequent in O'Neill. Even the lengthiness...