Word: shiffrin
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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...
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...
...Like It Here (by A. B. Shiffrin; produced by William Cahn) is a trying little comedy that wobbles from weakness when not hobbling from age. It plumps down a resourceful refugee (Oscar Karlweis) as houseman in a professor's none-too-happy home...