Word: vail
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Closing Door (by Alexander Knox; produced by Cheryl Crawford) is melodrama that raids psychopathology for its thrills. What its door is closing on, with what threatens to be a deafening bang, is the sanity of the hero. Sullen, suspicious, harrowed by dark memories, Vail Trahern (Alexander Knox) can still, after a quieting talk with his wife (Doris Nolan), agree to go to a sanitarium for treatment. Then, thrown off balance again, he runs off, has somebody else turn up at the sanitarium in his name, and steals back home to precipitate a ghastly mess...
...thriller and is full of clinical detail and therapeutic advice, some of it Freud and some of it scrambled. If this adds to the weight of the play, it only proves, in terms of good melodrama, a dead weight. Toward the end, however, as the adolescent events that poisoned Vail's life emerge simultaneously with the frightful method he took to find release, The Closing Door achieves an extremely gruesome ten minutes...
...that frays the nerves rather than tingles the spine. The Closing Door is not particularly boring; it's just not much fun. Something unpleasantly oppressive about the play is accentuated by something peculiarly awkward in the playwrighting. Actor Knox, with his very low-keyed but believable performance as Vail, proves Playwright Knox's strongest ally...
...representative Joe Miller routine went on between Mrs. Lela Rogers and Representative Vail of Illinois without the benefit of either straw hats, soft shoes, or Swedish dialects...
Said a Beeville resident: "They might as well have gone out and hanged themselves as to pull a gun on Vail...