Ghetto Chayefsky

By * Lance Morrow

WHAT THE WINE-SELLERS BUY by RON MILNER

Steve Carlton is a bright and loving son to his widowed mother. He wears a Northeastern High School jacket, dribbles a basketball round the house and spoons with his sweet girl friend Mae, the cheerleader. But Steve falls in with a bad companion from next door, and before long his mother hardly knows him.

What the Wine-Sellers Buy, which opened in Manhattan last week, is essentially a sentimental domestic morality play of wayward youth, a play that is a dramatic refugee from the 1950s. EXcept that here the characters are black and the setting is the Detroit ghetto. The bad influence arrives in the form of Rico, a wonderfully reptilian pimp who means to apprentice Steve to his trade by having the lad peddle Mae in the streets. Will Steve choose the life of vice? Will he break his old mother's heart, not to mention Mae's?

The answer is not much more interesting than the question. It is, of course, both dislocating and diverting to have such small-time Chayefsky framed in a raw ghetto context. Much of the wild street talk is funny, and the acting often superb. Glynn Turman's Steve is a skillfully subtle combination of pride and confusion. Dick A. Williams' dazzlingly evil pimp sweeps round the stage, almost a production unto himself, costumed like a Liberace with soul.

At last, a sort of Middle American virtue triumphs in the victory of mother, church and romantic love. In the final scene, when Steve rejects the life of sin and sweeps up Mae (Loretta Greene) in his arms, her feet leave the floor and you almost expect her, slowly and sensuously, to kick off high-heeled shoes in Hollywood abandon to the last Cuddle.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.