If conventional stagecraft is chiefly the art of illusion, the technique by which an accomplished monologist makes real a panel of wholly imaginative characters is sheer sorcery. At performing the hardest of the theatre's tricks, Monologist Cornelia Otis Skinner is a topnotch sorceress.
A fine figure of a woman, she has inherited profound theatrical abilities from her father, venerable and gifted Otis Skinner, and her mother, onetime Shakespearean Actress Maud Durbin. Last week Miss Skinner presented in Manhattan her first full-length (1 hr.; six scenes) production with a U. S. scene.
In...