WISE CHILD

(1972 Broadway Comedy/Drama)





THE FUGITIVE IN DRAG A review by Richard Watts of THE NEW YORK POST


For a simple-minded play, Wise Child is remarkably bewildering. The English offering by Simon Gray, which opened last night at the Helen Hayes Theater, is a kind of Charley's Aunt of the criminal classes, its plot seems clear enough on the surface, and I thought it was terrible. But, outside of that, I can't promise to give you an accurate idea of what went on in its story of two men who are hiding in a hotel apparently in flight from the police.

Of the two fugitives, the elder has disguised himself as a woman and the younger is pretending to be his dutiful son. The boy, who has a lot of blonde hair, has an appeal for the homosexual hotel owner, who has strong hopes of seducing him. In their turn, the criminals have developed a scheme to take advantage of their host's amorous desires by getting to the cash drawer in the office and making away with the money they find there. They accidentally kill him.

Both of them have heavy Cockney accents, which may have had something to do with my uncertainty over what they were talking about. But I think my difficulty was due mainly to the author's obscure way of handling his narrative. He struck me as being more interested in the efforts of the hotel owner to sneak into the boy's bedroom and the comedy of a masculine-looking man pretending to be a woman and removing his wig to reveal a bald head.

There are a few minor issues. For example, the disguised man wants to see an attractive black servant girl in the nude and he tries to persuade her into nakedness by claiming to be a photographer who intends to take pictures of her for the magazines. Like most of Wise Child, nothing comes of it. He is interrupted before she is completely stripped, and gets out of his embarrassment by declaring it was all the girl's own lascivious idea.

At times, the three men rush in and out of the hotel-room doors as if they were characters in a Feydeau farce, and I wish they had been. Despite good performances, Wise Child is effective neither as a comedy or a melodrama, being caught up forlornly between the two moods. The play's conception of humor seemd to me symbolized by a scene in which a necklace gets twisted around a man's ear, but that might just have been a first-night acccident.

In London, the fugitive in drag was played by, I believe, Alec Guinness. Here it falls to the lot of Donald Pleasence, and I can't imagine it being better done. Another fine actor, George Rose, does everything possible with the role of the hotel owner and Bud Cort is excellent as the boy, while Lauren Jones is charming as the black girl. You certainly can't blame the players. The ending of Wise Child puzzled me, but it was welcome.

Review courtesy of Christina McClendon.

Review © 1972 THE NEW YORK POST. All Rights Reserved.





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Above photo courtesy of Christina McClendon

Photos © 1972 Paul Alter. All Rights Reserved.

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