Word: simpleton
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...strike up St. Louis Blues. Best tunes: With a Banjo On My Knee, There's Something in the Air. Best scene: Miss Stanwyck and the crooner sitting side by side, delivering monologs on their respective troubles, neither listening to the other. Best role: Buddy Ebsen as a river simpleton...
...Simpleton of the Unexpected Isles (by George Bernard Shaw; Theatre Guild, producers). Fifty years ago last week a young man with lots of self-confidence sat down in the reading room of the British Museum to write his first play. He called it Widowers' Houses. George Bernard Shaw had already met with indifferent success as an orator, fictionist and Fabian Society member when Dramacritic William Archer presented him with a skeleton plot and persuaded him to turn his talents toward the theatre. It was not long before Shaw was back with the news that he needed more plot, having...
...Simpleton of the Unexpected Isles, as usual, some painfully normal English folk were thrust into an eccentric setting, this time among the godlike inhabitants of an island just arisen from the sea. Strutting his pretty taste in paradox, Playwright Shaw again discussed polygamy, Empire, the Church, vegetarianism, Fascism, Indian Independence, medicine...
...prolog dragged into the first act and the first act into the second, The Simpleton of the Unexpected Isles cast a thick pall over its audience. Here was not only nonsense, but tiresomely outmoded nonsense. Critical verdict was unanimous: The show should never have been staged...
...lament is that the Bergers and their friends would not be so wretched if it were not for the crushing tyranny of the capitalist system. Grandfather Berger, an old Marxist, would not be compelled to jump off the roof in despair. Daughter Hennie would not have to marry a simpleton after Moe Axelrod, the embittered disabled veteran, gives her a baby. Son Ralph would not have to pine for the sweetheart and sport shoes he cannot possess on his $16-a-week salary...