Word: shiffrin
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Black-Eyed Susan (by A. B. Shiffrin) showed what can be achieved, with a little real effort, in the way of topnotch vulgarity. All about a young wife's seduction of a neurologist, it pawed and lipsmacked its way through a torrential downpour of double-entendres. The tone, here and there, was no worse than sniggering...
With Black-Eyed Susan, author A. B. Shiffrin has attempted a play in the genre of The Moon Is Blue. Like F. Hugh Herbert's earlier effort, it is a drawing-room comedy with the shades pulled, featuring affairs which New York critics like to call "delightfully naughty." Unfortunately Black-Eyed Susan lacks the subtleties of its predecessor; the author is too consciously daring. Instead of appearing as a sage of the boudoir, he seems more like the little boy who has just pulled a successful raid...
...raid is successful simply because Mr. Shiffrin gets what he is after: a play which bases its humor almost entirely on the more ludicrous aspects of seduction. Late in the first act, Dr. Nicholas Marsh, a dying neurologist played by Vincent Price, is approached by Susan Gillespie, played by Dana Wynter. Black-Eyed Susan, as she is later called, has a strange request: in three years her husband has failed to present her with a child. She wants the doctor to act in loco parentis...
...Shiffrin has written a bad comedy. In giving the theatre one black eye, however, he has managed to keep the other sharply trained on the type of humor which seems to have the most commercial appeal...
Angel in the Pawnshop (by A. B. Shiffrin; produced by Eddie Dowling & Anthony B. Farrell) is set in a pawnshop -with all the sad variety of its wares, and all the tangled human history behind them, to draw upon. But Playwright Shiffrin has written a sentimental fantasy in which everything that doesn't seem banal seems borrowed, and in which he displays a kind of genius for crushing the life of words...