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| Joan Hackett, Len Cariou. |
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| Len Carious, Elaine Kerr, Joan Hackett. |
This first Broadway play by Lucille Fletcher (“Sorry, Wrong Number”), a highly successful writer for film, television, and radio, is a brooding mystery drama set in an expensive Manhattan apartment occupied by a neurotic, insomniac heiress, Elaine (Joan Hackett). She claims she has seen, in the window of a tenement across the way, a man’s horribly murdered corpse. The police investigation turns up neither corpse nor other evidence of foul play. It’s suggested that the woman’s story is fantasy.
Eventually, the cops ignore
her frantic calls. Her stockbroker husband (Len Cariou) attempts to soothe her and, among other things, proposes that she travel to a Swiss clinic for
therapy. His motives, however, are made to seem nefarious. It’s clear that he’s
having an affair with his wife’s friend (Elaine Kerr). The play ends with the surprise
device of the wife having been the scheming genius behind the entire plot.
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| Joan Hackett, Keene Curtis. |
Joan Hackett’s performance as the high-strung Elaine was
masterful. Both she and the play were accorded several strong notices. Clive
Barnes was pleased at this “most superior thriller . . . , which from its first
blood-curdling scream to its last charming surprise is a first-class example of
its genre.”
Fletcher’s characters, dramatic tension, and Hitchcockian suspense
kept many on the edges of their seats. The play offered Douglas Watt “a
satisfying series of surprises,” and fulfilled for Richards Watts “all the
requirements for an evening of satisfying menace and mystification.” Martin
Gottfried, however, claimed it was burdened with clichés and “unnecessary” persons
and scenes, lacked mystery, was poorly acted, and was “never interesting and often
trying.” And Walter Kerr assailed it for too many red herrings and a vastly
confusing plot.
The cast included Keene Curtis, Jeanne Hepple, Martin
Shakar, William Kiehl, Barbara Cason, and Rudy Bond.
