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| Anne Jackson, Hume Cronyn, Eli Wallach, Richard Backus (front). |
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| Anne Jackson. |
A generation-spanning comedy with four scenes taking place, respectively, in 1895, 1920, 1945, and “approximately now.” It allowed its stellar, four-member cast opportunities for tour-de-force performances in which, with costume and makeup changes, they could each play a variety of roles. The story chronicles the fortunes over 75 years of the Huntziger family, shortened to Hunt, with its focus on Willie (Richard Backus, Hume Cronyn), heir to the family’s button-making fortune.
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| Eli Wallach. |
The critics enjoyed the acting more than the play, which Clive Barnes termed “amiable, at times rather too bland, and often too obvious, but with a few really sharp lines.” Walter Kerr said it was a “stock company play” with too many clichés and too few surprises. “Mr. Robison makes his points with crude, cartoonlike strokes,” noted Brendan Gill, and “is almost invariably leaden when he should be light” John Simon, observing that the comic material dealt primarily with sex and money, said it did so as “mostly facile doodling and dawdling facetiousness.”
Barnes, after highly praising Cronyn's work, opined:
Mr. Wallach [has] fine fun, first as a repressed old man vicariously admiring his son's sexual freedom, and then as his own grandson, mean, bigoted and determined to end up very, very rich. Although Mr. Wallach acts everything larger than life and Mr. Cronyn acts everything smaller than life, in this play their acting styles seem perfectly complementary.
Anne Jackson plays all the women . . . , from aged grandmother to middle‐aged matron and plays them all with a gentle emphasis and smooth skill. Finally completing the quartet is Richard Backus. . . [,] an actor of great resource and promise. . . [;] here he jumps generation gaps as if they were hurdles.
The actors were members of a new group called Loose Actors Revolving Company (LARC), which boasted a membership of many top stars, and which intended to produce worthwhile plays on Broadway. The plan vanished after this first attempt failed, even with Eli Wallach and Anne Jackson backing up veteran Cronyn and talented newcomer Backus. The latter won the Theatre World Award, the Clarence Derwent Award, and the Variety poll for Most Promising New Broadway Actor. If you wish to learn more about his subsequent career, click here.
