Who Killed the Bluebird?

By T.E. Kalem

Who Killed the Bluebird? If a marriage can die a hundred deaths, it can seemingly survive a thousand coroner's inquests. Who killed the bluebird of happiness, and when?

Robert Anderson puts the questions anew in the second, longer, and stronger of his duo of playlets, Solitaire/Double Solitaire. (The first is an Orwellian fantasy penned in plastic.) In Double Solitaire, Charley (Richard Venture) and Barbara (Joyce Ebert) have allowed 23 years of marriage to carry them from bliss to boredom. Charley is also caught in the middle of the contemporary value crisis. On the one side are his parents, people of stamina and principle, who have weathered 50 years of marriage. On the other side is Charley's son, who flaunts his liberated liaison with a girl he doesn't intend to wed, and who upbraids his father for choosing durability at the cost of joy.

Behind the talk of loss and emptiness, there is a voice that speaks more tellingly than talk. It is that of Robert Anderson, best known for Tea and Sympathy. It is literate. It is--horrors!--the voice of a gentleman, someone who has been taught from childhood to uphold certain standards of decency.

The failure of his marriage perplexes Charley, but the assault on his codes brings intolerable pain. He is incapable of philandering--one antidote for marriage-poisoning urged on him. He is equally incapable of ricocheting from marriage to divorce to marriage to divorce. This is what makes the play, and its dilemma, undeviatingly honest. Anderson offers a final comfort that is small, but not cold: the heart is the only broken instrument that works.

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