Witchy Laugh Potion

By T.E. Kalem

THE WOMEN by CLARE BOOTHE LUCE

This is a vigorous, thoroughly entertaining revival of Clare Boothe Luce's saucy 1936 saga of bare-knuckled Eves. Interestingly enough, the play is something of a rarity in terms of the U.S. theater's comic tradition in recent decades. We have grown accustomed to kooky comedy, sight-and-gag comedy, situation comedy and even black comedy. But Mrs. Luce writes social comedy.

The genre disappeared after World War II because the class structure mirrored in the play came to an end with that event. Implicit in the play is a great divide between superiors and inferiors, patricians and plebeians. However they err, the patricians are sanctified by wealth, birth and breeding. Whether they are openly envious or openly critical, the plebeians are content or resigned to being maids, manicurists or powder-room attendants. From the vantage point of 1973, one of the fascinations of The Women is that it is positively class-ridden.

The central conflict of the play is a plebeian foray into patrician territory. Crystal Allen (Marie Wallace), a perfume clerk, seduces and steals the husband of Mary Haines (Kim Hunter). Since Mary is a pretty decent woman compared with her feline friends, audience sympathy gravitates to her. Crystal is a steely predator who wants her share of the spoils, but as an arriviste, she cannot keep her social footing. She is caught out in another liaison, and Mary gets her husband back. In effect, the lower orders have been chastised for their presumption.

The irony is that the social heights to which Crystal aspires operate on a code of ethics no more elevated than hers. These women lie, cheat on their cheating husbands, booze it up and assassinate each other's characters between brunch and bridge. Even while she gives tongue to their malice, Mrs. Luce clearly sees them as parasites who neither toil nor spin, except for their cunning webs of mischief. Like a social anthropologist, she follows these felines to their lairs--exercise parlors, hairdresser sessions, nightclub powder rooms. In an all-female play, these scenes cater to the U.S. male's assumption that women are as much a conspiracy as a sex, and Mrs. Luce reveals that the conspiracy is centered on him--how to get a man and how to hold him.

The humor that makes The Women such a savory pleasure is as much of a rarity as the play. Mrs. Luce's lines border on the aphoristic, but they lack the pith and elegance of fine aphorisms. Her true forte is the sniper fire of sarcasm in which one character fells another in midstep or midsentence. Many of these lines fall to the busybody superbitch played by Alexis Smith, and she is a past mistress of the lethal riposte.

Split between old film hands and old stage hands, the cast is uneven in performance. Making her Broadway debut as Mary's mother, Myrna Loy, 68, seemed apprehensive in her entrances and exits and confined her delivery to flat recitation. Also making her first Broadway appearance, Rhonda Fleming, 49, seemed to be posing for a camera rather than playing to an audience. Of the stage veterans, Dorothy Loudon and Mary Louise Wilson are tartly expert comediennes, and Jan Miner is wonderfully hilarious as a countess addicted to husbands (five) and alcohol (90-proof).

The Women may prove addictive. In this 37-year-old play, Clare Boothe Luce stirred distillate of venom, claw of cat and tongue of strumpet together, and brewed what is still a wicked witchy laugh potion.

sb T.E.Kalem

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