Motel

In Thomas W. Phipps' Motel Siobhan McKenna plays a prominent Washington lawyer who believes herself to be in love with her much younger and very eager assistant, and so accompanies him to the Dugout Motel. Presumably ensconced there for the evening, she suddenly leaps from bed and exclaims in anguish, "I just don't know what I'm doing here!" With regard to Miss McKenna's position as a brilliant actress, these are appropriate words, for Motel is a very, very bad play.

With Motel, American drama has reached the nadir in its quest for the misbegotten hero: enter Wally Troy, retired major league baseball star (hit .325, 127 rbi's in his best year) and present owner of the Dugout Motel. Helping Myron McCormick as Wally is Vicki Cummings as Ruby, his complaining wife. Ruby has discovered that old baseball players make lousy motel owners, and she yearns for the old days when she had something to cheer about.

The third couple consists of a young girl who is pregnant but has no husband, and her boyfriend, who loves her, but doesn't think he would make a good husband, although he has made a good father.

Naturally, they all meet and solve each other's problems. Such things happen in almost any motel fitted within the size of a theatre stage so that people can run in and out of cabins helping each other.

The good neighbor policy is precipitated by Wally Troy, who treks from cabin to cabin explaining in third-base-coach fashion that "the game isn't over 'til the last fly is caught," and that "you got to give." By applying this world series weltanschauung to her own life, Miss McKenna persuades the young man to marry the girl, realizes that people count, and repays Wally by extricating him from a jam. All is saved; and SYMBOLICALLY (of course) the M on the neon MOTEL sign flashes back on; it had been off during the play.

Mr. Phipps has a view of human nature which makes it as malleable as a baseball game where the batters make sacrifice plays for each other. Perhaps this dugout philosophy has truth in it, but that the rules for happiness and self discovery should effuse from the straight-jacket mind of Wally Troy is repulsive to anyone's sensibility. Ruby Troy's loneliness, which Wally fails to understand or aid, is the most genuine problem, which Phipps fails to develop, since it would interfere with his pat ending.

Motel automatically rises to the level of theatre when Siobhan McKenna speaks or moves or even stands in her contrapposto fashion, but against the cliche of line, improbability of story, and a pseudo-realism of cursing, bedroom scenes, and drunkenness, which make the characters less than two dimensional, she cannot possibly attain her usual brilliance.