The Widower Takes a Wife

Poor Richard. Success defines the limits of a playwright; failure may suggest his aspirations. Jean Kerr's Poor Richard is that kind of failure. She comes to the new play still wearing the life-of-the-party grin from Mary, Mary, but something in her mind is now saying that life is not that kind of party at all, and the result is a probing but irresolute comedy. Mary, Mary was a joke-filled shopping bag that existed to be torn so that the laughs would tumble out. Poor Richard is a net hopefully cast to trap character and at least two themes of some gravity--the capacity to love and the squandering of talent.

Richard Ford (Alan Bates) is a best-selling poet who was once indentured to his creative task but now plays host to his legend. If a lovely flame has died, no smoke gets in poor Richard's eyes, only more liquor to his lips. He has the kind of flypaper charm that women love to get stuck with. Inevitably, a Columbia journalism student (Joanna Pettet), who has worshiped him between hard covers, proposes marriage.

But the widower-poet is haunted by the conviction that his late wife never thought he loved her and that he probably didn't. One of her journal entries unearthed by Richard's editor strikingly reveals the contrary, and with this security clearance as a love risk, the poet feels free to wed his blonde disciple.

The journal entry is the fulcrum of the play, and it intervenes like a deux-ex-Olivetti, imposing an arbitrary happy ending without being psychologically convincing. Like most writers, poor Richard may have been an edgy, self-absorbed husband, but two people who live together for any length of time read each other, without needing the assurance of posthumous journals. Jean Kerr knows this and says as much when she has a character remark that the present generation thinks love "isn't real unless we have a fever of 103."

Mrs. Kerr's concern with the abuse of talent is more than a housewifely horror of waste. Richard Ford is the man who has everything but has lost possession of himself. He is possessed by the world and lived by others. The treachery of money and fame is that they debunk money and fame, and Mrs. Kerr hints at this but refuses to put bite in the insight.

Regrettably, substance is frequently sacrificed to surface. Like Eliza crossing the ice floes, the compulsive witticist in Mrs. Kerr reflects a mind too busy to stop and sink. But unlike lesser jokesmiths, Jean Kerr can always be trusted to produce the wit that is instant wisdom, as in "The affair you don't get over is the one you never had."

Poor Richard is not well served in direction and cast. Director Peter Wood has the Kon Tiki touch: he sets the play adrift for the night and apparently prays that it will reach its destination. As The Caretaker showed, Alan Bates is fearfully good at transmitting menace, but as a charmer his signals are garbled. As Bates's second mate-to-be, Joanna Pettet is an indelibly enticing ingenue, but speech is her impediment. She says all the words correctly, but her avidly sincere delivery turns comic gold into lead. Poor Richard is not rich enough to afford a cast and director who do more to put the play under than over.

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