The Damned & the Dim

Night Life, by Sidney Kingsley, contends that people are selling their souls for a mess of pottage, which the playwright exchanges for a pot of message. Having bemoaned the decline of love, honor, courage, idealism and even healthy humor, a leading character announces, "The poets have given up on mankind."

A rather special segment of mankind occupies Kingsley's boozy, smoke-hazy, symbolic inferno, a red-velours-lined Manhattan key club. But essentially the members of this eclectic hell divide be tween the damned and the dim. The damned shine phosphorescently. The dim give off flickers of goodness. Among the damned: an ambisextrous movie queen (Salome Jens), a thuggish labor czar (Neville Brand). Among the dim: a songstress with maternal yearnings (Carol Lawrence), a lawyer with a festering case of Korean combat fatigue (Jack Kelly), an aging poet-turned-furniture-dealer (Walter Abel) and his wife (Carmen Mathews) who has a Ponce de Leon complex. From 1 a.m. to dawn, these characters soliloquize, harmonize (around a stage-center piano), and bend the playgoer's ear without touching his heart or prickling his nerves. They all seem to be high on bootleg rhetoric ("You drink a cup of sunlight, you're immortal").

Before the first trickle of sunlight, lust, cynicism and murder get their melodramatic comeuppance. The meek do inherit the earth, but boredom has long since claimed the stage.

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