No Pity for Parents

The Cantilevered Terrace (by William Archibald) is about a family that is distant in love, close in hate. Indeed, the hate is running so high that three minutes after the curtain rises, the son is plotting to have his best friend push his aging parents off a cliff to their deaths. The play, like the family, is haunting and irritating, eloquent and garrulous, terrifying and petulant, half gem and half paste.

The rich Perpetua family is a representative tyranny. Each member feels free to call a spade a spade, thus turning it into a hatchet. The hatchet is then buried in the skull and heart of a loved one. All are good at this bloody game, but Mother (Mildred Dunnock) is champion. To Mother, domestics, children and husbands are lower orders of nature. To God, whom she seems to despise as a greater snob than herself ("God is like a very famous person to whom an introduction is impossible"), she says, "Do I have to come at you and cut you down?" She has cut her son (Colgate Salsbury) down to a homosexual, her daughter (Marcie Hubert) to a bewildered emotional waif, her husband (Don McHenry) to a mumbler of prayers in his pillow.

Yet Mother, and Father too, are being cut down by the terrors of old age: "Surfaces that were once level tilt." Life has become a cantilevered terrace that has taken a crazy tilt. A letter read by Father evokes a vision of the children when they were tots frolicking fondly with their parents, and as Mother sings a Christmas lullaby the first-act curtain descends on a twilight reverie of bygone tenderness.

But the children as adults are steely, unforgiving judges. The second and last-act curtain sees the son's friend trailing the parents on his murderous mission. Playwright Archibald is wise enough to know that parents are loved and hated because they are parents and not necessarily for what they do and do not do, but he cannot achieve the emotional dis tance from his subject to move his son and daughter characters past love and hate to understanding.

The Cantilevered Terrace consists of conversation to the extent that a water melon consists of water, but the play's poetic juices run far too purple. The drama is static, but often as electricity is static. None too likable, the characters assert their right to respect as well as humiliation. As a failure, Terrace exerts more magnetic pull on a playgoer than some playwrights' successes.

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