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| Helen Hanft, Steven Davis, Mary Carter. |
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| Alix Elias, Carleton Carpenter in What Is Making Gilda So Gray? (Photo: Zarko Kalmic.) |
This play represents
two-thirds of a trilogy called The Three
Sisters of Springfield, Illinois, the third part of which was performed
with the first two for 12 performances from October 1, 1974. The third part, What Is Making Gilda So Gray? (or, It Just Depends on Who You Get ), was performed alone, beginning September 17, 1974, at the Top of the Village Gate, for 15 performances. All of the
material had been staged several times Off-Off Broadway (with most of the same
actors) since 1965. The Gilda of the third piece is the sister of Hanna and
Sophie, whose characters are linked in the first two playlets (produced as a
single play). Confused? Me too.
A campy, episodic,
surrealistic fantasy about a Forty-second Street movie theatre ticket seller named Hanna O’Brien
(Helen Hanft), the play takes place in a Coney Island funhouse, where Hanna
gets her thrills by standing over the blowhole in the floor that tosses her
skirt high and also lifts her spirit. Other characters include Sophie (Mary Carter; succeeded by Madeleine le Roux), her hated, bald, Avon saleslady sister
from New Jersey; a narcissistic young man on a trapeze named Arizona (Steven Davis); and
the funhouse barker (three actors: William Duff-Griffin [succeeded by Joseph C. Davies], Neil
Flanagan, and Jerome Eyen).
Well-acted and staged, the comedy proved fairly popular in its Off-Broadway mounting. Clive Barnes said the
writing was not particularly clever, but was effectively “atmospheric” and “evocative.” He added that “Its humor is corny, its message banal, but the dog-eared reality to
its fantasy and its sense of wasted freak-show lives in a crumbling, neon-lit
side-show give the play an aftertaste and a validity.” Others
found it amusing, witty, and generally worth the price of admission.
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unpublished manuscript that would have been part of my multivolume Encyclopedia of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.
Next up: Wild and
Wonderful.
