Word: talker
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Under these static circumstances, the play is not the thing, or even a play. Essentially, Happy Days is a monologue by a compulsive talker. A strident school bell signals the times when Winnie must wake and sleep; in between comes the terrible recess of endurance, the "happy day" to be survived. She utters a prayer, sings a song, chews the nostalgic cud of memory. Actress Ruth White, though she plays her role with more gallantry than Beckett's morgue-attendant austerities call for, stars vocally: she croons, keens, gurgles, fumes and screams at her all-but-silent partner...
Diem is an obsessive talker who can hypnotize a visitor with four and five hours of monologue. One recent visitor arrived at 4 p.m., rose to leave at 8, pleading a dinner engagement. "Call them and tell them you will be late," said Diem, and talked on for another two hours. He breakfasts on bouillon, rice and pickles. "I am no aristocrat. I eat like a peasant," he says...
...first-class barroom talker, which Robert Ruark is, needs a knockabout past, a creative memory, sufficient humor to see the vanity of his inventions, and a delivery good enough to shield from his listeners the gravy stains on material, memory and wit. With this equipment, a talker who happens to be, say, a journalist, can Jang out a newspaper column for years in an average daily elapsed time of eleven minutes (so Newspaperman Ruark has coasted; one suspects the creative memory is an aid in recounting the feat). Or he can put together two volumes of yarns about his boyhood...
Only less remarkable than how brilliantly Wilde could write is how badly, and at times Mac Liammoir seems to use the bad less for thinking it expressive of Wilde than for thinking it good. There is small effort to recall the most dazzling talker of modern times, and far too much to stress Wilde's scarred and suffering side-in whom the play-actor yet persisted...
Compulsive Talker. Comedienne Diller nearly always mentions her own brood of children: "They're for sale, and those who aren't working are marked down." The oldest is a 20-year-old college stu dent, and all five live with an aunt and a grandmother. Their father, Sherwood Diller, travels the circuit with Phyllis as husband-manager (by train, since she is fond of dresses, uses 22 suitcases...