Geriatricks

A Very Rich Woman has ague in its funny bones. Actress-Playwright Ruth Gordon has tried to create a drawing-room comedy about old age--and the chief reason that the play cannot sustain itself is that old age is no joke.

In its slapdash way, Woman is an eccentric comic parody of King Lear. Mrs. Lord is a solid-gold widow of 75, with nothing on her Bostonian brain but freshly dyed hair and a yen for yachts. Lear courts catastrophe when he parts with his realm; Mrs. Lord gets into trouble when her daughters fear that she will squander her fortune on herself. Lear is cast out on the storm-blasted heath and loses his mind; Mrs. Lord is kidnaped after a Boston Symphony concert and railroaded to a loony bin.

While there, she gets just mad enough to cry. The episode might be more affecting if Ruth Gordon had not made Mrs. Lord just as odious as her Goneril-and-Regan duo of daughters. As every contemporary playgoer knows, the family is an heir-conditioning unit: bitches beget bitches. The denouement is embarrassing, as Mrs. Lord marries one of those beamish Balkan boys with a rich grandmother fixation.

A band of genuinely old troupers Raymond Walburn (78), Ernest Truex (75), Madge Kennedy (75), and Ethel Griffies (87), plus Ingenue Heidi Murray (17), handle with finesse lines that they ought scarcely to have touched. As Mrs. Lord, Ruth Gordon (69) relies on her trademarks rather than her talents, notably a nasally barbaric yawp of a voice that would have stopped Genghis Khan in his Asiatic steppes. Woman is her lost labor of self-love.

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