Word: sligar
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...Sligar and Son has the air, at least, of being a drama of contemporary racial strife. The setting is a ghetto grocery store in pre-riot Newark. The characters refer to black people as "blacks" and white people as "honkies." Still, I have my doubts as to whether Hoye actually knows any more about the ghetto than Spiro Agnew. His one-act play is not about black power or slum despair or even law and order as much as he would like us to believe it is. Rather, it is the story of a simple white bigot whose son rejects...
Even within the context of its elementary substance (which, I'd say, even Stanley Kramer would find old hat), Sligar and Son fails to come off. The plot, flatly melodramatic at best, usually seems contrived and often collapses under the strain of its distortions of reality...
FOUR-LETTER WORDS aside, the dialogue of Sligar stretches the imagination almost as much as the plot construction. The lines range from pure exposition to the hokey (Father, speaking of the son: "He called me old man!") to the absurd ("I don't know where you're headed, but you're going to be pushed there damn fast."). Some of the worst writing centers around Paul's teenage affair, gratuitously stuck into the second half--complete with flashback...
...might guess, directing Sligar and Son is not of the most enviable jobs on God's Earth. Still, Chris Sorensen could have done more to soften the blows the plawright's pen have wrought. With a heavy-handed script, heavy-handed performances aren't exactly the order of the day, yet that is primarily what we get from the largely freshman cast. Typical is Glenn Schewtz as the gum-chewing father. He has a strange way with a line, and Sorensen might have tried to correct the problem. Schewtz starts off slow and loud, then becomes fast and loud like...
...Perhaps Sligar and Son wouldn't seem so bad, if it didn't try to pass itself off as a slice of ghetto life, circa 1967. But this is what it does, from the language to Debbie Waroff's fine naturalistic set. Not for a moment does the playwright convince us that he knows what he is talking about. (Hardly does the play begin when he shows us a hippie reading that revolutionary tract Black Like Me.) The playwright who wanted so much to give his work the sound of Stokely Carmichael gave us the sound of a foul-mouthed...