Monday, May. 14, 1979

Late Bloomers

By T.E. Kalem

TALLEY'S FOLLY

by Lanford Wilson

The flavor of this play is Tennessee Williams in a mildewed tea bag. The setting is a dilapidated gingerbread boathouse in Lebanon, Mo. The time is 1944 or, more pertinently, the limbo of time wasted. The heroine, Sally (Trish Hawkins), is 31, and a Wasp whose real creed is to suppress emotion in gentility, a twin sister to Alma Winemiller of Summer and Smoke. The hero, Matt (Judd Hirsch), is a Jewish accountant from St. Louis, a bachelor of 42 and one of life's perennial Gentleman Callers.

This is his second call. He had fallen in love with Sally the summer before. Now he has come back to woo and win her. Sally is skittish. She has felt woefully unworthy ever since a local merchant prince jilted her because a childhood illness rendered her infertile.

Matt has the haunted, agile, mocking temperament of a man whose family was blooded by the dogs of Hitler's Europe. To him, a child is too dear a hostage to give to fortune. After 94 elongated minutes, these deep dark secrets are out, and amor vincit omnia.

Wilson is a writer with a quirky gift of humor and a romantic bent for a lyrical line, but this entire one-acter seems to be happening in the past tense. Sally and Matt are an appealing duo, but a two-character play without imminent Pinteresque menace is a good facsimile of claustrophobia.

--T.E. Kalem

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