Death on Demand

A Gift of Time (by Garson Kanin) is the sad, clinically harrowing story of a man who is dying of cancer of the lower bowel, and how he faces it during the last three months of his life in Southern France. The Broadway play is based on Death of a Man, Lael Tucker Wertenbaker's account of her husband's suicide. Charles Christian Wertenbaker was an able journalist (for FORTUNE, LIFE, and TIME from 1931 to 1948) turned novelist. Gift is strangely unmoving and dramatically slack, partly because the audience knows in advance that the hero will die, partly because it never gets to know and care about the man himself, and partly because he opts for suicide as a way out before he even struggles with the un bearable pain that might have purged and shaken the playgoer with pity and terror.

Wertenbaker (Henry Fonda) becomes a self-dramatizing romantic, and an intellectual hedonist with a somewhat arrogant presumption about accepting life or death on any but his own terms. Being an "artist at living" is his sole belief, and when he drinks the hemlock of approaching death, it must be like an "exquisite brandy." His, and the play's, point of view is that man is essentially a good animal, and when he sees himself becoming a bad, i.e. maimed, animal, he may admirably put an end to himself.

Apart from the overtones of demi-semi-Hemingway in this creed, the play casts doubt on the joy of life that it rather self-consciously preaches ("use all five senses every day"). To treat life as a branch of esthetics is to observe one's responses to it, rather than engage spontaneously in it, to play-act rather than act, or play. When Wertenbaker and his wife Lael (Olivia de Havilland) make love, he asks for a morning-after review. "Miraculous, as always," she replies, making two people who believe it.

From scene to scene, Henry Fonda visibly erodes with stoic dignity. A trifle over-animated, Olivia de Havilland nonetheless grows in gallantry and warmth. But as the play empties into the bowl over which the hero slits his wrists, it seems to leave behind it no revelation, only a stubborn ring of illusions.

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