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| Lois Smith, Biff McGuire. |
“Come Next Thursday” [Marriage]; “Twas Brillig” [Films]; “So
Please Be Kind” [Sex]; “Present Tense” [Marriage]
Biff McGuire and Lois Smith, both A-list stage actors,
appeared in each of these four Off-Broadway one-acters by Frank Gilroy, author
of the hit play The Subject Was Roses.
Supporting them were less well-known players Stanley Beck, Sarah Cunningham, and
Gary Nebiol. “As entertainment,” concluded Clive Barnes, “the pulse [of these
plays] is dim and distant.” The evening struck John Simon” as an almost
complete, although completely likable, failure.”
“Come Next Thursday” is a black comedy about a wife (Smith)
who manages to overlook her wayward husband’s (McGuire) faults. “Twas Brillig”
deals with a Hollywood screenwriter (Beck) unable to compromise his principles
to please his studio boss (McGuire). “So Please Be Kind,” considered the
program’s strongest piece,” shows a pair of adulterous lovers in a hotel room
who are unable to consummate their passion when they get sidetracked by an
inability to remember the name of an actor they passed in the street. The final
playlet is about a husband’s (McGuire) attempt to keep his wife (Smith) from
learning of their son’s death in Vietnam.
Barnes thought the evening as a whole too wordy and only
sporadically stageworthy. Simon commented, “Despite good acting, the work doesn’t
belong in a theatre struggling for its life, which won’t be saved by amicably
pseudo-serious trifles.”
Until the pandemic hit, of course, Lois Smith, in her mid-90s, continued to reign as a beloved doyenne of the New York stage (not to mention other media). One hopes she will return in good health to provide more of her personal and artistic warmth when this thing is over.
