The Ossified Heart

By T. E. K.

THE HEIRESS by RUTH and AUGUSTUS GOETZ

based on Washington Square, a novel

by Henry James

This play briefly opens a window on one woman's life and then permanently locks the door. The heiress, Catherine Sloper (Jane Alexander), is an awkward, self-denigrating, plain-featured girl who falls ardently in love with a handsome fortune hunter named Morris Townsend (David Selby). He knows how to simulate passion since money is his love.

Catherine's doctor father (Richard Kiley) is a sardonic man who resents his daughter bitterly. To him, Catherine is an aching reminder that his wife died in giving birth to her. He violently opposes the match. Having diagnosed Townsend's intentions, the doctor is quite unconcerned about the condition of Catherine's ossifying heart.

When Townsend realizes that the girl will be disinherited if she marries, he jilts her. After the doctor dies, Townsend renews his suit, and Catherine, now grown into a confirmed, cynical spinster, pretends to accede in order to have the revenge of a woman scorned and to jilt him in turn.

So much depends on the dramatic switch ending concocted for the play that The Heiress seems to owe more to O. Henry than to Henry James. As a revival it must compete, too, with the memory of earlier incarnations, the 1947 play with Basil Rathbone and an oft-replayed movie starring Ralph Richardson as the coruscating father. The torment inflicted upon the daughter by the father can still stir old-fashioned pity, even in the age of women's lib, and the claustrophobic gentility of this 1850s New York home adds a note of melodrama.

The cast is admirable. As a plumeless bird in a gilded turn-of-the-century cage, Alexander draws a poignant portrait of repressed freedom. As a dry rulebook tyrant, Kiley gives us a man whose only contact with the heart is through a stethoscope. Playgoers whose attention spans have been shortened by films and TV may get restless at Director George Keathley's pacing, which is meticulous and deliberate.

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