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| Arthur Kennedy, Eileen Heckart. (Photos: Martha Swope.) |
Note: Because of
a mix-up in the manuscript, the alphabetical order followed by this series was
disrupted when I skipped the V section and jumped to the W’s instead. Today’s
entry returns to the V’s and will get to the rest of the W’s, not to mention
the Y’s (there are no X’s and Z’s) in due time.
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| Arthur Kennedy, Eileen Heckart, Regina Baff, Kipp Osborne. |
A young woman named
Susan (Regina Baff), out at restaurant with a new boyfriend (Kipp Osborne),
meets an elderly servant couple (Arthur Kennedy and Eileen Heckart). Susan is
convinced by them to come to their home near Boston, where their senile old
employer, a woman, is dying, and to impersonate her long-dead sister, Veronica,
whom Susan closely resembles. Susan goes along, dresses in Veronica’s 1930s
clothes, and prepares to meet the old lady, but finds instead that she is
locked in her room, that the servants are Veronica’s parents, that the
boyfriend is a psychiatrist of sorts, that everyone behaves as if it were 1935
instead of 1973, and that she cannot convince them of the contrary. Finally,
beaten and stripped naked, she is carried away by the young man for some unnamed, but
clearly foul, purpose.
Implausibility, poor
construction, timeworn dramatic devices, and vague motivations were among the
charges leveled at the play, written by one of the most successful mystery
writers of the era (Rosemary’s Baby, Deathtrap). An appropriately spooky
Gothic design scheme and four capable performers—two with significant name
recognition and professional respect—could not rescue this unthrilling thriller
from such barbs as Jack Kroll’s: “It is laughably mechanical and as embarrassing
as a sunken-eyed, foul-breathed English professor confiding his
sado-masochistic dreams in the college cafeteria. . . . Levin mucks up; such
pristine ingredients as incest, insanity, ritual murder and necrophilia.”
A program note
requested that theatregoers not disclose the plot. Clive Barnes responded, “Their
secret will be safe with me. There were times when it looked pretty much safe
with the playwright.”
Barnes said of the
acting, “As Susan or Veronica, Regina Baff was most impressive. She beat
against fate like a spunky little sparrow, and her mixture of frenzy, and
reason was nicely judged. Eileen Heckert and Arthur Kennedy are very polished
as her friends and tormentors. Miss Heckert is malicious in her modulation,
throwing away asides with acidulated panache, and Mr. Kennedy, more bluff and
blustering, provides her with a subtle contrast. Kipp Osborne as the young man
in Susan's life, perhaps goes too far at the end. But then so did the young
man.”
Regina Baff was
Tony-nominated as Best Supporting Actress, Play, and Douglas W. Schmidt won a
Drama Desk Award as Outstanding Scenic Designer.
Do you enjoy Theatre’s Leiter Side? As you may know,
since New York’s theatres were forced into hibernation by Covid-19, this blog
has provided daily posts on the hundreds of shows that opened in the city, Off
and on Broadway, between 1970 and 1975. These have been drawn from an
unpublished manuscript that would have been part of my multivolume Encyclopedia of
the New York Stage series,
which covers every show, of every type, from 1920 through 1950. Unfortunately,
the publisher, Greenwood Press, decided it was too expensive to continue the
project beyond 1950.
Before I began offering these 1970-1975 entries, however, Theatre’s
Leiter Side posted over 1,600 of my actual reviews for shows from 2012
through 2020. The first two years of that experience were published in separate
volumes for 2012-2013 and 2013-2014 (the latter split into two volumes). The
2012-2013 edition also includes a memoir in which I describe how, when I was
72, I used the opportunity of suddenly being granted free access to every New
York show to begin writing reviews of everything I saw. Interested readers can
find these collections on Amazon.com by
clicking here.
