Prosciutto & Melodrama

Daughter of Silence, by Morris L. West, produces a phantasmagorical sensation, like being imprisoned in a dream that is vivid in detail but totally opaque in substance. In the dream, the playgoer finds himself in the square of an Italian town framed in time-mellowed stone arches. A brassy mayor is making an election speech. After he finishes, a girl (Janet Margolin) with a pale, troubled face slips a revolver from her purse and shoots him dead. The dream shifts. Two men and a woman are in a conservatory with a grand piano. They look unhappy. One man (Emlyn Williams) is urbane and silver-bearded; he is a bad father. The younger man (Rip Torn) is tense; he is a bad husband. The woman (Joanne Linville) is bitter; she is a bad daughter to Williams and a bad wife to Torn. During piano breaks, the three revile one another and occasionally try to purple-patch things up: "Forgive me if you can, but if you can't, at least believe that I love you." (The secret of why they have made such a mess of things remains safe with the playwright.)

The dream shifts again. The murderess is on trial. It develops that during World War II, when the girl was eight, she saw her mother raped and murdered by the mayor, who was then a partisan. It rankled, or to put it in the language of the play, a "trauma" led to an "obsession." Be that as it may, argues the prosecutor, the girl is guilty, and the law is order and must be maintained. The girl's lawyer (Torn) argues that justice should be tempered with mercy. This creates quite a stir in the courtroom, and the black-robed judges nod gravely, apparently never having heard the idea before. Playgoers who cannot wake from the dream at this point and focus on an exit sign deserve this melodrama's remaining surprises.

Since Daughter of Silence is coming out simultaneously in novel form, it might be assumed that Novelist-Playwright West (The Devil's Advocate) had closed the motivational gaps of the play in the pages of the book. Not so. The novel simply contains more characters, more scenery, and more murky rhetoric. Director Vincent J. Donehue's idea of giving the play stature is to have the actors speak in capital letters. This helps to make 18-year-old Janet Margolin's Broadway debut doubly attractive, since she has the great good luck of having little or nothing to say.

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