Word: shelterer
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...moral state of America has almost nothing to do with its present precarious hold on the future: a better America, a fairer America, a less commercial America, would be in much the same international plight. And it seems to me that the greedy desire of a shelter owner to keep out the people who have not been able to build their own refuges is a different kind of evil from that which prompts men to push missile buttons...
...agree with Gardner that one is faced with a choice to build or destroy in modern America. The first stranger who cames seeking refuge in Michael Hooper's shelter is one of the construction workers who built it; later, there are flashbacks about workers building shoddy apartment houses. Shelters, Gardner seems to say, are only a part of a civilization that builds for death, not for life. Agreeing with this, though, is not the same as agreeing with Gardner's untenable conclusion that shoddy, cheap, commercial values are the causes of nuclear...
...these differences of opinion really matter to a play like Rain Never Falls. I simply do not believe that the people struggling in this shelter fifty feet below the ashes of Queens are responsible in any way for what has happened to them. For me, therefore, the play lacks meaning...
...said I enjoyed the production. Gardner gives some excellent dialogue to the working class figures and itinerants who fill up the shelter. As the construction worker who brings his wife and son to the shelter Renato Rosaldo is sympathetic and competent. His wife, Myra Rubin, has, in the face of some maudlin lines, great dignity...
...best pieces of acting in this play coincide with its best-drawn roles, and Gardner's failure in portraying the middle class owners of the shelter is painfully obvious; he has made the Hooper family caricatures, and bad ones at that. (One wonders ho he would have sketched a working class shelter owner.) John Walton as Michael Hooper tries manfully to blow life into his dead role by force, bluster, and over-acting; his wife, Frances B. Barbour, faces the same problem with similar results...