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| Helen Gallagher, Brad Sullivan. |
HOTHOUSE [Drama/Alcoholism/Family/Marriage/Women]
A: Megan Terry; D: Rae Allen; S: Lawrence King; C: Vernon Yates; L: William
Mintzer; P: Chelsea Theatre Center of Brooklyn; T: Chelsea Theatre, Brooklyn
Academy of Music (OB); 10/15/74-11/10/74 (32)
Avant-garde feminist playwright Megan Terry offered this
surprisingly traditional realistic work about a family living in a fishing village
cottage not far from Seattle. The focus is on three bawdy, hard-drinking women—a
grandmother named Ma Sweetlove (Dorothy Chace), a mother named Roz (Helen
Gallagher), and a teenage daughter named Judy (Kathleen Tolan). As Michael
Feingold’s review implied, this trio offers a female version of the machismo
behavior of conventional working-class men.
Roz is a former singer whose marriage to Jack (Brad
Sullivan) is crumbling and whose daughter is involved with a clean-cut boy
named David (Michael Cornelison). Roz and Ma aren’t happy about the
relationship, and interfere in it. Jack wants Judy to stay with him on his
boat, out of range from Roz’s influence. Roz has a lover, Andy (R.A. Dow). Jack
has been carrying on with Roz’s friend Doll (Carol Morley). All ends
ambiguously with the girl neither staying with her father nor marrying David.
Feingold said this conclusion “dramatizes neatly the
position of women in a man’s world.” Terry’s play allows the women to end up
with each other in a way that doesn’t involve their having to compromise
themselves with the men in their lives. Feingold, who took much interest in the
play, thought its major defect was the depiction of David, as if Terry had not
been able to give the “opposition party” of males “a fair shake.” Otherwise, he
thought it a “wise and painstaking production,” with a “mostly excellent” cast
who all “sound like real people.” He called the play “an American Bernarda Alba, pulsating with lowlife
and desire.” Clive Barnes’s diametrically opposed view described Hothouse, despite its good writing, as “cheap
and obvious—it is a cliché set to the music of grimy and sudsy soap opera.” He
liked Rae Allen’s “lively” direction, but called the acting “as heavy handed as
the play.”
