Theater: Oedipal Farce

A man is given his first birth, but an artist has to earn his second one. So arduous is this struggle, so embedded in a writer's marrow, that he almost always devotes one autobiographical work to it. Playwright Oliver Hailey's Who's Happy Now? may not be autobiographical, but it has the indelible sound of private experience. His play belongs among the most perceptive portrayals of the son-father relationship that have been brought to the stage. Its special quality is that it is an Oedipal farce, zany, effervescently comic and full of as many crazy laughs as a clock has ticks.

The setting...

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