In the Summer House

Just what authoress Jane Bowles is groping for in here trellisted summer house, a real Child's Garden of Freud, is difficult to imagine. Her characters are strays from the snake-pit, her dialogue is obscure, and the play is wildly incoherent. With cery strains from a vibra-harp introducing the scenes and occasionally backing the dialogue, the play is something for a Grenwich Village theatrein-the-round. Even in this setting, however, the play might be poorly received, since the obscurity seems hardly worth penetrating and often embarrassingly silly. In the Summer House, in fact, has many inadvertently funy moments, and the frequent laughter of the audience need be traced neither to insensitivity nor to pscudosophistication. wistful and pretentious, the whole business seems at times a wicked parody of the Capote-McCullers school, the "fragile, searching" play with "flashes of oblique insight."

The theme or key neurosis of the play is a matter of personal preference. The incapacity of the unloved for normal love, the introvert hiding from an extrovert world, the destructiveness of possessive motherhood are all possible choices. From the impressive stars of the play, Judith Anderson and Mildred Dunnock, the audience might expect some help in choosing, but even the cast appears unsure of what Mrs. Bowles' characters are meant to express. At the heart of the play are two unnatural mother-daughter relationships. In one, an iron-willed mother has crushed her child's personality, in the other, a wispy woman vainly seeks the affection of her daughter, a shrill hysteric who detests her. Beyond this, however, the play cannot be reduced to any pattern. The plot is at least as diffuse as the conversation, and the principal roles range from the alarmingly neurotic to the quite mad. Take Gertrude Eastman-Cuevas (Miss Anderson). Though sometimes she has "shadows," which she dispells by drinking "fizzy water," she is usually hard as nails, nagging her daughter Molly with contempt and loathing people in general. Her father, it seems, didn't love her. When she at last decides that the needs Molly and reveals herself as no pillar of strength, Molly gives her a healthy cuff and sets off for St. Louis.

Before she revolts, Molly is a monosyllabic young lady, who mopes in the summer house, reading comic books (Super Mouse). Although she is the closest thing to a heroine in the play, Molly is dangerous when peeved, since she apparently murders the neurotic young boarder, Vivian. In spite of her faults, however, Molly snares a husband, who loves her bacause she only "half hears" him, a good thing considering the rot he talks about. doggedly he bears with her through exchanges like: "Molly, we can't stay here playing cards in the Lobster Bowl cocktail lounge until we're old." Molly (ingenuously): "If we got a biger light-bulb, we could play in the bed-room." That Elizabeth Ross and Logan Ramsey manage to give a hint of life to theses impossible roles in remarkable.

Hovering in the background of all this, is Vivian's widowed mother, an alcoholic since the death of the daughter who despised her ("My bird, my bird" . . . "She hopped from the cliff like a cricket"). Miss Dunnock seems uncertain whether she should be tragic or pitifully absurd, as she flings hot-dogs around the stage and talks of the husband who never loved her. In any case, she gets little sympathy, least of all from Mrs. Eastman Cuevas, who tells the widow who clutches her hysterically and begs her not to leave: "Stop brooding!", a line reminiscent of Charles Addams' "Stop mumbling, Georga!"

The rest of the characters are normal, in a rather hideous way. There is solares, the Mexican whom Mrs. E-C marries, and his appalling family, which looks like something out of Margaret Mead. Although the Solares relatives sing, screech, and dance, they spend most of the time slumbering all over the stage like Mexican bookends. As the lusty Mrs. Lopez, however, Marita Reid creates a vivid character. Adding two more very modest virtues to the play are a brief and irrelevant comic bit by Jean Stapleton, as a vulgar waitress, and the rather intriguing perspective of Oliver Smith's oceanside set.

Unless you are intent on seeing something more or less serious, you would do far better to spend your money on Almanac, which a month in Boston has turned into a fine show. Two weeks and a miracle would barely do the same for In the Summer House.