Word: tree
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Peter Ustinov often gives the impression that he can write a play with one hand tied behind his back. Unfortunately, half of Halfway Up the Tree seems to have been written with the tethered hand. Never so bad as to make its intermissions seem like blessed reprieves, Tree is never so good as to make its acts seem like comic rewards...
...sure. His bearded guitar-laden son (Sam Waterston) looks "like a leftover from the Last Supper," and his so-called mistress is a breastless, hipless, bass-voiced androgyne. Ultimately, the general goes his filial foes one better at anarchic nonconformity by growing a beard himself, living in a tree and mastering the guitar. The quality of the humor is as strained as the plot. Ustinov seems to have aped Bernard Shaw without the wit, Neil Simon without the wisecrack...
Otero's biographer, Arthur H. Lewis (The Day They Shook the Plum Tree), is a former newspaperman in the old copydesk tradition, relying heavily on choice clips and spicy quotes. He also does his duty by psychology and suggests that the fatherless Otero's entire life may not have been so much a triumphant romp as a protest against the man who raped her. If so, she certainly kept on protesting-and protesting. She had her last lover, it has been said, at 60. A compulsive gambler, she had lost her entire fortune by 1926 at the casino...
...village square, the tree-trunks are no longer white-washed. The police have painted them blue and white, the national colors. Every house is adorned with a new flag-pole. Policemen come by to tell the people when to raise the flag, and when to pull it down again, for the frequent nationalist celebrations proclaimed by the Junta. A goat is spread asleep in front of an old stable, under-neath a flag. Thank God the Greek national colors are beautiful...
...Like most New Orleans' housing, this ward is laid out checkerboard fashion. A block of Negro homes may be followed by a block of white homes. The economic pattern is just as complex; a block of huge columned mansions screened from view by heavy oaks, crepe myrtles, or magnolia trees may be followed by a block of pleasant middle class homes which boast a few palms or maybe a banana tree, followed again by a block of near-shacks with a scraggly clump of gladiolas growing outside...