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The homely. Hungarian soul of the young cousin accepts everything, including her offhand promise to divorce her husband and make a respectable man out of her lover. But in the morning, when the impossible but wealthy husband arrives, she forces her night-owl to hoot some efficient lies that restore her to her spouse. The game of tag is over—and the youth is it. He finds he has been spending the night with a Fata Morgana—a will o' the wisp beauty, who dissolves with the morning mists. In its sense of the immense calamity of adolescent rebuff in love, this play by Ernest Vajda borders on tragedy, saved by a youthful sense that tomorrow is another day. It is shot through with sardonic, Continental gleams, and a tingling realization that an amorous adventure can be masked by a stuffy, comatose countryside. Emily Stevens brings out admirably the incisive spirit of the careering city woman. But it is Morgan Farley who outgrows his juvenile skin in youth's encounter with matronly magic. He gives a deft and sensitive picture of the lad who discovers that love has its morning-after taste also. William Ingersoll and Josephine Hull (as his parents) and Orlando Daly and Helen Westley give veracious performances in an engaging production that shows the Theatre Guild on a picnic.
E. W. Osborn: "A dramatic Hungarian goulash, greatly underdone."
James Whittaker: "The play is our good old friend 'One Night' with Cleopatras served up in costume from distant dressmakers. It adds notably to our knowledge of how the Puszta peasant gets into his Sunday clothes and as scandalously to our knowledge of how he gets out of them."