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TIS AN REV lEW
(marital infidelity), while its situations blend domestic jokes with
erotic fantasies.
In
The-MMriage-Co-Round,
which is typical, the
hero, a college professor, is persuaded to commit adultery by a Swed–
ish Amazon who, apparently having read Isadora Duncan's letters
to Bernard Shaw, wants to create a perfectly endowed child; when
the professor's wife threatens to revenge herself in kind with his best
friend, he gets the Amazon to leave the house, and the husband and
wife are reconciled. Meanwhile, the souffle is given the illusion of
significance by theatrical devices: the play features a revolving stage,
where the dramatic action takes place, and two podiums on either
side of the set, from which the hero and heroine lecture the giggling
audience on the sexual eccentricities of the opposite sex. Clearly, the
Westport comedy is written for an age which finds adultery a source
of indulgent laughter rather than pious horror, and it owes its suc–
cess to a jocular familiarity with the spectator's more permissive atti–
tude towards marriage.
As
a result, the suburban spectator finds a blood brother in the
hero of the Westport comedy. The baggy-pants comedians of the
farces have either died, or retired, or turned to non-comic pursuits.
Bert Lahr may still clown occasionally (in plays like
Waiting For
Codot ),
but the old anarchist Groucho Marx has washed off his eye–
brows, grown a dapper moustache, and become a bourgeois quiz–
master on TV. The exaggerated features, grotesque makeup, and
outlandish costume of the stage zany allowed him to indulge his
uninhibited eccentricity; and a comic like W.C. Fields, by alienating
the spectator, was often able to attack his traditions and conventions.
The domesticated comic hero of the 'fifties, on the other hand, strives
for audience identification. Whether endowed with glamorous earnest–
ness, like Charles Boyer and Joseph Cotten, or confused "normality"
like Tom Ewell, Tom Poston, and Orson Bean, the Westport hero
now doubles as an organization man, impersonating Junior Execu–
tives in crew cuts and Ivy League suits. The domestic background
of Teddy Hart and Jimmy Savo was once a matter of indifference;
but David Wayne is invariably a family man, worrying-like the
audience- about his wife, his kids, his income, and the payments on
the car. Several cuts above the old comedy in sophistication, the West–
port comedy, nevertheless, signifies the death of laughter, for comedy
cannot survive such reciprocation between the audience and the stage.
