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Poor Richard
Poor Richard, by Jean Kerr
(Richard Ford) 2.xii.64, Helen Hayes Theatre, Broadway
directed by Peter Wood with Gene Hackman (above)
from the Journal American, 3.xii.64
- "Poor Richard" (at the Helen Hayes Theatre,
Broadway)
- by John McLain
-
 LAST NIGHT AT the Helen Hayes
Theatre was a nervous night for me. Jean Kerr, wife of Walter
Kerr, the critic from the Herald-Tribune, had written
a play to follow "Mary, Mary" which has run longer
than all of us, and here we were sitting in judgment on the new
one, "Poor Richard," in the same seat which might have
been right behind Mr. and Mrs. Kerr, as is usually the case.
 It is hard to say what I would
have done If it had been a bomb, for I dearly love Mrs. Kerr
and do not think she is capable of writing anything truly trivial,
but it could have been a let-down after her earlier success and
there would have been the old scrambling around trying to be
polite.
- Happily this is not necessary,
for I believe she has another winner. I am a big soft sucker
for stage characters that seem to make sense to me and these
did. I was concerned and captivated.
- Her hero is a sort of Dylan Thomas
drinking poet, a Britisher who has come here to attend or not
attend a ceremony dedicating the wing of a hospital in the memory
of his rich and deceased American wife. He is supplied a secretary,
a most decorative young doll, who almost immediately announces
that she has been his fan -- and wants to marry him.
- This is her original intent,
but then as she comes to know him better she changes her mind.
She decides that he is something less than his writings; he can
charm a bird off a bough, but has he the ability to cherish and
comfort and live with a wife?
- There seems to be this big thing
about whether he really loved the departed first wife or whether,
as he protests, he married her merely to make it possible for
him to further his career as a writer.
 There are
sub-situations. His publisher is in love with this loan-out secretary
and there is a sister of his wife who comes along to urge him
to take part in a ceremony in her honor which he strenuously
rejects, and there is the diary of the deceased which proves
that she loved him deeply. This guy is not beyond redemption,
however.
- What really makes the piece is
the writing of Mrs. Kerr and the brilliant performances of Alan
Bates, the non-conformist poet, Joanna Pettet, the secretary,
and Gene Hackman, as the square publisher.
- Mrs. Kerr's lines are riddled
with wit and wisdom: She has the facility of bursting into the
most serious scene with a remark of miraculous nonsense without
losing the essence.
- These people talk and behave
like living and breathing humans, and so I became seriously concerned
with what was going to happen to them. I guess that's about all
you have to do, as long as you keep them interesting, and Mrs.
Kerr never lets them go dull.
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- Poor Richard closed 13. iv.65, after 117 performances.
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