Consolation Prizes

An appetizing hors d'oeuvre of an actress can sometimes keep playgoers nibbling on toothpick drama. Broadway's latest dramatic toothpicks. Daphne in Cottage D and There's a Girl in My Soup, are inane, inept, tacky, trivial, and implausible, but Sandy Dennis and Barbara Ferris may yet prove potent teasers of the public palate.

Daphne is a brief encounter between two neurotically maimed misfits. In Act I, they kiss; in Act II, they tell. As the desolate widow of a movie star, Sandy is committing slow alcoholic suicide, shot by shot, and is barred from her young son as an unfit mother. The man (William Daniels) has an even more guilt-ridden tale. In the driveway to his home, he ran over his own child on the boy's fifth birthday, and has been fleeing from the memory ever since.

The consolation prize, if any, for this maudlin bundle of bathos is Sandy Dennis. She draws laughs from tears. An accident-prone waif who bruises an eye, bangs a toe and burns a finger, she runs to the audience to be comforted. She flutters and stutters, and sentences spill out of her mouth like rag dolls losing their stuffing. By now, though, this little-girl-lost act is beginning to cloy, and Sandy Dennis is in danger of losing her acting momentum in mannerisms.

Soup is about a bachelor gourmet editor (Gig Young) on the rueful side of 40, who thinks that variety is the spice of sex life until he meets The Girl. Barbara Ferris is a fetching house urchin who wears her microskirt so short that the evening seems like a continual panty raid. Her undies scan better than the dialogue, which unravels along such lines as, She: "You only want me for one thing." He: "Yes, but what a lovely thing." If the polish is in Ferris' frame, the spit is in her delivery. She has a snort like a tugboat, she can carve an inflection into a tombstone, and she blows bubbles of mirth that might have lured Ulysses off his course. She keeps theatergoers from remembering that the play's the nothing.

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