Go West, Young Playwright

One antidote to Broadway's bruising hit-or-flop economy is the regional theaters' desire to nurture new plays and playwrights. Up to now they have been pretty timid about it. The tendency is to cater to the subscribers' varied tastes by dividing a season between classics, proven Broadway hits of recent vintage, and such fashionable avantgardists as lonesco, Beckett, Pinter and the ubiquitous Brecht. More ambitious than most, Los Angeles' Mark Taper Forum is genuinely trying to offer original plays. One such experiment, Oliver Hailey's Who's Happy Now?, opened last week to generally happy notices by local reviewers.

Menage `a Quatre. An autobiographical mood-and-memory piece, the play's setting is a cheerless gin mill somewhat reminiscent of the bar in Saroyan's The Time of Your Life. The narrator hero (Warren Berlinger) recalls how from earliest childhood he had been brought to the bar night after night by his mother (Betty Garrett), who is driven by a masochistic thirst to watch her butcher husband (Warren Gates) while away the evenings with a waitress floozy (Peggy Pope). In her firmly devoted way, the mother believes that the boy should get to know and understand his carousing father. It is a futile hope: in a drunken stupor, the father tries to kill the boy with a meat cleaver. Yet beneath the coarseness and brutality, each member of this oddly pitiable, oddly humorous menage `a quatre is reaching out for love.

The meat cleaver of sudden death on Broadway hit Oliver Hailey in 1966 when his play, First One Asleep, Whistle, a lumpy porridge of marriage and adultery, closed on its opening night. Hailey, 35, does not believe he could have survived the blow to his playwriting morale except that he had already completed Who's Happy Now?, over which he had brooded for ten years. His father had been a butcher, who frequently moved the family from one small Texas town to another--"those Panhandle towns where the main street goes on and on and on, and there's nothing much behind it, like a movie set." Hailey acknowledges that the play "was anchored in my childhood, but it was too grim. I always saw it sad. Always turning that knife. Nobody wants to go to a theater to cry about my family. I had to get far enough away from it to see it as funny before I could write it."

More than one New York producer is dickering to bring the Hailey play to Broadway. In the future, the quickest way for a young playwright to come East may be to go West.

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