Word: ranchman
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...want my audience to feel rather than think," said Playwright Megan Terry about her Viet Rock, which ran for 62 Manhattan performances in 1966. Obviously, she has not changed her mind. The People vs. Ranchman, which opened off-Broadway last week, is equally devoid of intellectual content. Paradoxically, though, it is likely to leave a mature playgoer doing more thinking than feeling...
...however, thinking about the subject of the play, which is a simplistic attack on American blood lust. Ranchman, played with great simian gusto by William Devane, is an accused rapist in police custody. A howling mob, which seems largely composed of teenyboppers, demonstrates throughout-half for him and half against him. A ratty prosecuting attorney introduces highly clinical and irrelevant evidence against him; the alleged rape victims-two women, a young girl and a boy-seem to have enjoyed every minute of the experience...
...Ranchman nevertheless pays the extreme penalty-extremely. He dies in the electric chair, in the gas chamber and by gunshot while being hanged. Each time, he is casually resurrected to go on talking, shouting and heckling with the rest of the cast, in the course of which none of them utters anything trenchant, or moving, or witty...
...chief trouble is once again book trouble, and the sense of a period musical in treatment as well as subject matter. Saratoga tells a tale of two young fortune seekers: an illegitimate New Orleans beauty and a ranchman gypped out of his inheritance, who unromantically team up to get ahead in the world but become the victims of romance. In telling its tale, Saratoga snows cliches, trips over its own gaudy furnishings, and interminably keeps a heroine who was born out of wedlock from entering it. An added trouble: lacking all freshness and zip, the show possesses no compensating charm...
Actor Ritchard plays an eternal playboy, a gleeful, middle-aged enfant terrible, an international charmer and flirt. When he descends on the correct San Francisco world in which his daughter lives with her mother and stepfather, and his own glamour puts the girl's serious young ranchman fiancé in the shade, the wedding bells begin to grow faint. For father's ideal of enjoying every real or sham pleasure goes to daughter's head like champagne. Simultaneously, the blood rushes to the ranchman's, and he denounces father's wastrel charms in ringing tones...