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| Sam Coppola, Karen Rosenblatt, Patrick McDermott. |
THINGS THAT ALMOST HAPPEN [Comedy-Drama/One-Acts] A: Claude McNeal; S: Tim Wilson; L: Paul T. Holland; P: Jules and Gila Zalon; T: Provincetown Playhouse (OB); 2/18/71-2/21/71 (5)
“Morton: The Patient”
[Mental Illness]; “The Courtship of Kevin and Roxanne” [Romance/Sex]; “Dominic’s
Lover” [Romance] SC: Robert Browning’s poem, “Porphyria’s Lover”
An evening of three
mediocre one-acts that to Mel Gussow were more “writings than plays. . . .
[T]hey are devised situations, forced crises, and difficult to sit through.”
Bloated by pauses (the author directed), these “long and tedious” works, said
Richard Watts, “were stubborn in their uneventfulness.”
In “Morton: The
Patient” a session between a bored analyst (Sam Coppola) and his patient
(Richard Lynch), a man whose wife divorced him and who threatens suicide, leads
to the discovery that both men are crazy. At the end, they exchange roles.
“The Courtship of
Kevin and Roxanne,” set in 1959, shows a young man (Patrick McDermott) and his
girlfriend (Karen Rosenblatt) in a car as he tries to talk her into having sex.
A cop (Coppola) comes by and tries to arrest them for lewd behavior, but his
superiors reject the charge.
“Dominic’s Lover,”
inspired by a Robert Browning poem, presents a young woman (Rosenblatt) who
goes to her schoolteacher lover’s (Coppola) flat where, bored by his inactivity,
she invites over a man (McDermott) to whom she is attracted. She hopes this
will stir the teacher to try and do something about it. The other man arrives,
then departs, and the girl, perhaps poisoned by the teacher, is found dead.
In brief, this was an evening that almost happened.
Next up: Thoughts.
