The Theater: New Play in Manhattan, Feb. 15, 1954

Lullaby (by Don Appell) concerns a 38-year-old truck driver who wriggles out from under his mother's thumb to marry a likable nightclub cigarette girl. The play first chronicles a honeymoon in Scranton complicated by Mother's rampageous arrival from New York; it then chronicles household arrangements in New York dislocated by Mother's inching her way into the household.

Since Mother is played by Mary Boland, Lullaby is considerably more farcical than Freudian. And since Mother—when not making herself pathetic and ill-used with every weapon in the Momist kit—proves a good deal of an old...

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