Word: talley
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...BEGINNING of Talley's Folly, it looks like Lanford Wilson has set out to illustrate a most commonplace idea: that opposites attract. The two characters that comprise his cast start at the antipodes of American society. Matt Friedman is a Lithuanian Jewish accountant, gray suit, beard and wire glasses, Mittel-European accent and Henny Youngman-style jokes. Sally Talley springs from a factory-owning Ozark tamily, works as a nurse in an army hospital (it's 1944) and has a jaw locked as tight as a cashbox. The two are not a very probable couple...
...something that any pol might envy. He controls the wacko constituency-weirdos, crazies and freaks. Fifth of July is a redo of his The Hot l Baltimore, transported to a creaky ancestral house in Lebanon, Mo. Aunt Sally (Mary Carver), wooed and won in Wilson's romantic drama, Talley's Folly, has come back 30-odd years later to scatter her late husband's ashes. On hand are some of the walking wounded of the intoxicant wars...
Sally's nephew Ken (Christopher Reeve), who now owns the Talley place, is perched on crutches, having lost both legs in Viet Nam. Through the marvel of commercial casting, cinema's Superman has become a homosexual cripple. Reeve gives his role the old college try-fervent amateurism. Ken's lover is Jed (Jeff Daniels), a horticulture nut. Ken's sister June (Joyce Reehling) has sedated her radicalism with bread baking, and her 13-year-old daughter (Amy Wright) is stoned on sexual voyeurism...
...credentials for the loony bin are also flashed by John and Gwen Landis (Jonathan Hogan and Swoosie Kurtz), who want to buy the Talley place. Gwen is a vivacious twit who used to bomb her father's banks and now blitzes audiences with her pop singing. Kurtz delivers her lines with a sly acidic malice that heralds the second coming of Eve Arden...
...money and approval, but producers themselves look to off-Broadway. Production costs have risen to such heights that backers no longer put money into a new play and send it on the road for seasoning. Instead, they will take an off-Broad way hit like The Elephant Man or Talley's Folly and move it to a larger house on Broadway. Thus, with what Cattaneo calls "a nod toward the future," Hamil ton asked Gene Saks, who directed such big budget hits as Same Time, Next Year and I Love My Wife, to stage Save Grand Central...