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| Elizabeth Owens, Hugh Franklin. |
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| Neil Flanagan, Humphrey Davis, Elizabeth Owens, David Duke, Hugh Franklin. |
By most accounts, this revival of once enormously popular
Hungarian playwright Ferenc Molnar’s romantic comedy, first done in New York in
1926, was the best work yet offered by the Roundabout, then situated in a tiny
basement theatre in Chelsea. There was considerable surprise at how deft and
stageworthy the old play remained, and at how cleverly the dramatist had
exploited his bag of tricks. In 1978, only five years later, the play received
a far splashier revival at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, directed by Frank
Dunlop with a cast headed by Rene Auberjonois and Kurt Kasznar.
The Play’s the Thing concerns
the methods Sandor Tural (Hugh Franklin), a playwright, and his collaborator,
Mansky (Humphrey Davis), devise to convince their young composer friend, Albert
(Richard Larson; replaced by David Dukes when the show moved uptown), that the
compromising love scene he overheard between his prima donna fiancée (Elizabeth
Owens) and an actor (Neil Flanagan) was something other than what he took it to
be. The premise gives Molnar many opportunities to cleverly toy with the
conventions of playwriting and with the concepts of illusion and reality.
Clive Barnes and Walter Kerr were among the majority who
truly delighted in Molnar’s well-made playmaking, his smoothly honed craft, his
charm, and his humor. “This is an evening of style and laughter,” wrote Barnes,
but John Simon thought no such thing. Reviewing the play after it moved to a
small Broadway venue, he wrote: “The Roundabout has converted [the play] into a
large shard of bottle glass, set it in a
tin ring, given it the finger.”
