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tries to read its bill of rights. The infantile blonde and the big, rich,
mindless thug do, at one moment, make a true picture of brute violence
and pathos, very much like the scene in
Frankenstein
where the senti–
mental monster by the pond unwittingly kills the child that attracts it.
Violence is not this play's enemy, but its
alter ego,
and this moment
symbolizes Mr. Kanin's own aggressive and tender approach to political
innocence quite as aptly as a page of
PM
type.
View
magazine, under the name of the
Theater Ubu,
has begun a
series of avant-garde evenings in the theater. Ramon Sender's
The Key
was presented recently in a comic style so robust and vigorously Amer–
ican as to disconcert some avant-garde sections in the audience which
had counted, apparently, on a less amused and more "amusing" evening.
The acting, particularly Miss Mary Welch's, had a wonderful gaiety
and bounce, an energetic directness that is never felt today in the pro–
fessional theater. This suggests that real acting, like real poetry and fic–
tion, has become the property of amateurs, that' is, of people who are
not doing it for a living. The actors here were professionals, but they
did
The Key
under unprofessional conditions, with improvised scenery
and costumes, insufficient rehearsals, and to an audience for which the
play was not a performance but a party, in short, an unprofessional
audience.
The Key
is a ferocious comedy about avarice and sex. With
its stock types and loose structure, it too had something artless, negligent,
and spontaneous about it, as though it were a scenario for a modern
commedia dell'arte.
There are drinks and dancing, and the next production is to be
La Putain Respectueuse
of Sartre.
MARY McCARTHY
