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| Marilyn Roberts, Estelle Parsons, Rhoda Gemignani. |
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| Marilyn Roberts, Estelle Parsons, Norman Ornellas, Beverly McKinsey, Michael Lombard. |
A confused attempt to blend outrageous farce with painful subject
matter that had Clive Barnes writhing in his “seat at both its coarseness and
ineptitude.” It treats the domestic miseries of a lower middle-class married
couple, Mert (Estelle Parsons) and Phil (Michael Lombard), following Mert’s mastectomy.
The action concerns the ever more wretched state of the couple’s relationship
in the wake of Mert’s traumatic operation. Unable to face the loss of sexual
attractiveness represented by the loss of a breast, Mert grows increasingly
despondent and alcoholic. Phil, a truck driver, fails in his attempts to
provide consolation. I
Throughout, exaggerated comic characters intrude, including Mert’s senile old mother (Marilyn Roberts), who goes around in roller skates and a headset and puts on a crash helmet so Mert can bop her over the head with a huge
mallet. There is also a pair of visiting friends (Norman Ornellas and Rhoda
Gemignani), the husband always lunging for his wife’s crotch.
The sordid air was unrelieved by the bizarre farcical
intrusions. Barnes, for one, accused Mert
and Phil of being “terrible,” “tasteless,” and “totally unconvincing.”
Parsons and Lombard were excellent, but Anne Burr’s play, statically directed
by producer Joseph Papp—of whom Walter Kerr said: “Mr. Parr is not an
imaginative director”—displeased nearly everyone for its dreadful writing and
dreary people. Of the latter, Brendan Gill avowed that “they are dead souls
inside dying bodies.”
Mert and Phil was
one of the plays produced during Papp’s reign at Lincoln Center on behalf
of the Public Theater, and, along with a few other Papp choices, was considered
one reason for the fairly rapid demise of his tenure there, since such plays
were anathema to that venue’s typical audience. Lighting designer Martin
Aronstein says in Kenneth Turan and Papp’s book (posthumous on the latter's behalf), Free for All, that it “was one of the
worst things that I’ve experienced in my entire life. It made absolutely no
sense doing those plays in that theater.” And star Estelle Parsons commented, “I
think it was an extraordinary play, but the language was very rough, the
truthfulness of it . . . was very rough, a little too honest for your upper-middle-class
white Lincoln Center audiences. I thought it was much too strong to do in a
subsidized theater.”