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| John Amos. (Photos: Friedman-Abeles.) |
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| Lillian Hayman. |
Even with a topnotch comic
talent like Carl Reiner directing, this one-night flop couldn’t avoid being
condemned as a “disgusting attempt at a comedy” by Brendan Gill. Steve Gordon’s
turkey sought to amuse and enlighten through its depiction of an avowedly
liberal, white suburban couple, Clifford (Dick O’Neill) and Elaine Grant
(Billie Lou Watt), and their Uncle Tom-like Black domestics, a gardener named
Luther Jackson (John Amos) and his wife, Beulah (Lillian Hayman), a cook who
speaks to God. The Jacksons are faced with a dilemma when their militant son, Leroy (John
Danelle), a fugitive who has blown up a bank, arrives at the Grants’ home in
Larchmont demanding $10,000 to help him escape to Algeria. The soon radicalized
parents get the cash by turning on their employers, whose liberalism quickly
flies out the window, and holding them up for the same money that was to be
left to them in the employer’s will.
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| Dick O'Neill. |
The critics took
issue with the play’s politics, its excessive anger in what purported
to be a comic romp, and the aggressive tone of the writing and staging.
Regardless of the many funny lines, Tough
to Get Help was “simply idiotic,” gasped Douglas Watt. And Clive Barnes
commented, “The play, with interminable and unfunny dream sequences, with
dialogue that seems to have been picked up wholesale from a TV situation comedy
and characters of no real comic depth or perception, does not have a great deal
going for it.”
Barnes enjoyed the
acting, though, especially that of Amos and O’Neill: “John Amos as Luther . . . is very
good indeed, and practically beats the script in the head for laughs. Dick
O'Neill is also first‐ rate as the hypocritical white liberal, with his grass and
his martinis, his left‐wing opinions and his right‐wing house, . . . and his
own enormous self-esteem.”
Note: my friend Ron Fassler sends me this note: "You forgot to mention what major Oscar-nominated screenplay the playwright Steve Gordon went on to write—a little movie called “Arthur”—only to tragically die of a heart attack about a year later at forty-four."
Readers of this blog may be interested in my review collections, covering almost every show of 2012-2014, available at Amazon.com by clicking here. Scroll down there for the three volumes of Theatre's Leiter Side.
Next up: Trelawney of the Wells.
