Word: pondered
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...U.S.A. Native playwriting was solid too, but at a less lustrous level and in less creative guise. Much, instead of being directly created for the stage, was made over from something else, whether in such clear successes as The Diary of Anne Frank, No Time for Sergeants and The Ponder Heart, or such interesting failures as Mister Johnson and The Young and Beautiful. At straight playwriting, Arthur Miller came closest to real achievement with A View from the Bridge, but he let a longing for Greek tragedy blur the play's kinship with primitivist drama...
...chalk players, naturally, had known it all along. As they queued up to cash their mutuel tickets (the favorite paid $5.20 for $2), they talked of another Kentucky tradition: "Never bet against the son of a Derby winner in a Derby." Needles' sire, Ponder, ran off with the Derby in 1949. And just to make the old saw stick, Ponder's sire, Pensive, turned the trick...
...horses and win the $148,800 Flamingo Stakes at Florida's Hialeah race track by 2¾ lengths from the 24-10-1 long shot, Golf Ace. Given a five-pound weight advantage simply for running on a home-state track, the son of 1951 Kentucky Derby Winner Ponder was still impressive enough to become a front-runner in the winter book for this year's Kentucky Derby...
Rich, bighearted, wackish Uncle Daniel Ponder has. among other benefactions, married a pretty little birdbrain (Sarah Marshall) and brought her-with her love of household gadgets-to a house without electricity, where she dies, at length, of fright during a thunderstorm. Prodded by an ambitious lawyer, her back-country kin charge Uncle Daniel with murdering her. The trial-of a modern-day Uncle Toby-calls to mind the trials in Pickwick and Alice in Wonderland. With cousins on the jury, kids overrunning the witness box, refreshments being served, Uncle Daniel first disappearing and then hiring the prosecution lawyer to handle...
...slight tale, the play retains a good deal of Eudora Welty's delicate tailoring. It can be as chatty and dawdling as a rural postman. But as against the flails and wind machines that keep most Broadway comedies in motion, The Ponder Heart catches a fresh and genuine creative breeze. For the most part, too, it moves along without having to wear either the pretty-pretty ballet slippers of fantasy or the hobnailed boots of farce. In a good production, David Wayne's Uncle Daniel is outstanding: he plays the part, not with small studio strokes, but with...