The Theater: New Play in Manhattan, Dec. 2, 1957

The Rope Dancers (by Morton Wishengrad) is that once-or-twice-a-season sort of play that is unsuccessful but "interesting." It introduces to Broadway a playwright who is almost struttingly grim, carrying larger-sized luggage than he can fill; but who seems altogether resolved to go his own way, even if he lose his way in the process. Laid in a turn-of-the-century Manhattan tenement, The Rope Dancers is a stubbornly harsh story of a lacerated family. Hard-working Margaret Hyland is a rigid, arrogant, unappeasably bitter woman with a lazy, feckless would-be writer of a husband (Art Carney) and an eleven-year-old daughter born with six fingers...

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