Playwright's Return

The Country Girl (by Clifford Odets; produced by Dwight Deere Wiman) brings back Odets, after more than ten years in the wasteland, to the land of the living. It by no means brings him back in triumph; even when his play throbs, it is not always with honest life, and by the end it looks footlighted and chalky. But it has passages of fierce feeling that only Odets could write, and characters that at moments are bitingly real.

The play tells of a once-famous actor who is a down-at-heel drunk, of his loyal, long-suffering wife, and of a bright young director who gives him a shot at a comeback. With defensive lies, the husband convinces the director that the wife, who is his one chance of salvation, is the whole cause of his collapse. Seeing the wife as the enemy, the director mercilessly upbraids and insults her until he learns the truth (which includes his being in love with her). After that, the play dribbles on, nursing the sort of comeback that is trite on the stage and untenable off it.

Odets creates for a time something like a new-angled triangle, and Paul Kelly as the husband, Uta Hagen as the wife and Steven Hill as the director give it tingle and intensity wherever possible. But the real story, which Odets walks up to and then quickly away from, is a compact little tragedy of misunderstanding. It is the story of a woman whose husband is killing himself and dragging her with him and who, for a final indignity, is accused of his murder. It needs austere telling without a false word or a florid gesture--let alone the director's sudden lovemaking, that smashes The Country Girl to pieces.'

Odets temporizes as well as blunders. Beset by the problem of having to make the play run till 11 o'clock and of wanting to make it run till June, he stages a double retreat from life into show business, filling out the play with colorful backstage detail, phonying it up with facile on-stage emotions. His talent is-flawing again, but from a faucet in dire need of a filter, 'it is depressing to find so much shoddy in a play that can here & there merge deep compassion with burning anger.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.