316
PARTISAN REVIEW
magnetic, very witty, worldly, candid and philosophical. A son of his by
Circe, a son of whose existence he had hitherto been unaware, lands on
Ithaca, defeats
his
father's soldiers and challenges him to single combat.
Odysseus tries to get Telemachus to do his fighting for him but he is
thwarted by a jealous Penelope and in the end goes to his death at the
hands of this son whom he has never before seen.Mr. Abel's wonderfully
intelligent and charming play has only one fault, it presents no character
who can rival Odysseus, and he has things too much his own way, dom–
inating the entire stage and soliloquizing now from this comer and now
from that. The other characters are sometimes
de trap.
Those who like to put their powers of resistance to the great6St
test ought to have seen Robert Hivnor's comedy
Th e Ticklish Acrobat
at the Artists' Theater. That would have given them a run for their
money.
In
the chaos of conflicting opinions and values that surrounds
us the vocabulary of praise and gratitude has been torn to tatters and
I do not know how to give Mr. Hivnor his due more than to say
that he is the real thing, a writer. I don't know how he has managed
to survive; it must take skillful management and great courage. The
matter ought to be inquired into.
Here is a resume of the plot: A young American woman in love
with culture and tradition has come to an ancient and shabby town on
the Adriatic. Her uncle, some sort of American official, has at her urging
tried to bring some relief to the depressed little town but he has been
. able to do no more than to interest an archaeologist in its history. That
proves to be enough. The American archaeologist begins to peel off the
centuries. He finds the nineteenth century fortress, the Venetian garri–
son, the Roman town, the Greek colony. The townspeople daily reca–
pitulate their history; they change ; they are filled with energy, awakened
from their depressed sleep. The ticklish acrobat of the title is a young
girl, the daughter of a family which for centuries has been dedicated
to the practice of ritual gymnastics. They are tumblers and aerialists.
A young American flyer who was shot down over the town during the
war, as he was floating earthward in
his
parachute met this young
woman flying through the air at her devotions. He fell in love with
her, and she is also in love with him. Unfortunately she is ticklish, now,
and whether it is Joe ZaneIIi the American or her father or her uncle
who reaches for her she begins to laugh. Sadly, she can take nothing
seriously, neither love nor religion. Her furious father blames the Ameri–
can, this barbarian who threatens all tradition with annihilation. Mean–
while our archaeologist is leveling the town. He is not in the least inter–
ested in his Roman or Greek discoveries. He has seen all that before,
