Word: ponderer
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...Ponder Heart belongs to a village idiot who is milked for laughs. The laugh content is perhaps too high, for the sensitive viewer chokes with indignation at the ponderous, and heartless treatment of old Dan Ponder. At the Shubert...
Authors Joseph Fields and Jerome Chodrov, however, do not search for comical situations in a plot which obviously has none to offer. Instead, they unmercifully exploit the humorous possibilities of Ponder's eccentricity. As a result, it is practically impossible to laugh with a character who must have been whimsical when short story writer Eudora Welty first created him. One has to laugh at him if one is to laugh at all; a lot of cruelty lies hidden underneath the glib surface of the comedy...
...short story to the play. He acts with an abandon very funny to watch, adopting a southern accent just sugary enough to be humorous without becoming cloying. His manner is full of comical inventions, except for some distracting gestures. But even Wayne, for all his talent, cannot make Daniel Ponder anything more than a pitiful, lost child...
...sense, Greer's acting sums up the spirit of the production: too much of an only partially good thing. Fields and Chodrov have written a funny play but they have sacrificed the chance to make Daniel Ponder into a really appealing or meaningful human being in order to milk him for laughs. Their method is unscrupulous, and the result is not quite satisfactory...
Expressions like "A continuing sort of oneupmanship" LJan. 9] make the average TIME reader backtrack, ponder, and shake or scratch his head. "Oneupmanship" is not even to be found in a golfer's vocabulary...