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| Michael Shannon, Joseph Boley, Fay Sappington, Henderson Forsythe, Patricia Elliott, Terry Kiser. |
IN CASE OF ACCIDENT
[Drama/Art/Friendship] A: Peter Simon; D: Ted Cornell; S: John Scheffler; C:
David James; L: Marc B. Weiss; P: William Craver; T: Eastside Playhouse (OB);
3/27/72-4/2/72 (8)
Some topflight acting talent was aboard this sinking ship
that went down after its first week. Nearly every critic agreed that dramatist
Peter Simon was a Harold Pinter copycat, but without the British master’s
talent to sustain the style. As John Simon, himself no Pinter fan, cracked, “If
there’s anything we do not need in the theatre it is pint-sized Pinter.”
In an upstate New York farmhouse, an ill young artist
(Michael Shannon; no, not the current star of that name) has been seeking
refuge for the past two months from the emotional and social frictions of his
city environment. An old couple (Fay Sappington and Joseph Boley) are caring
for him. Three of his New York friends—his girlfriend (Patricia Elliott), a
former school teacher (Henderson Forsythe), and an effete art dealer (Terry
Kiser)—find him out and try to get him to return home. Finally, following a car
accident in which the friends are involved en route back to New York, he agrees
to leave for the city.
The “play is about as inviting as a gin-and-bitters with a
spoonful of Ivory Flakes added,” sneered Michael Feingold. Clive Barnes
commented on the “stilted” quality and its pretentiousness, while Simon
attacked the “meaningless conversations” and “painstaking outlandishness” of
this “inscrutable concoction.”