The Theater: Bawdy! Lusty! Unashamed!

For over six months Chicago has supported a hillbilly horror which advertises that it “Makes Tobacco Road Blush.” Maid in the Ozarks, written by housewifey, Ozark-born Claire Parrish, is no spoof, but a serious mountaineerful. Though the management plays it up as “Bawdy! Lusty! Unashamed!” its real stock in trade is not sex but unsavoriness —bedbugs and bedroom crockery, belches and body scratching, hogcalls and outhouses, a halfwit boy who picks his toes on the breakfast table and rubs his face with worms.

The play, which two years ago had a hit-or-miss run in Los Angeles, was slow starting in Chicago. The critics were brutal, saying such things as “The Great Northern Theater is going to be a parking lot if it doesn’t watch out.” For months the enterprise squeaked through by selling two tickets for the price of one—mostly to high-school-age smirkers. In January it was set to close, but was taken over by a saloonkeeper and a hat-check man who abandoned the play’s haphazard promotion for a frontal attack featuring sex. Lately, with $3,800 expenses, the play has raked in $10,000 a week, and a road company is being rehearsed. Its destination: war-busy, well-heeled Detroit.