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Miss Lonelyhearts (adapted from Nathanael West's novel by Howard Teichmann) was pretty plainly ill-fated for the stage from being so hopelessly ill-suited to it. Nathanael West's story of a young newspaperman (Fritz Weaver) jauntily taking over an agony column, only to grow more and more horrified and sickened by the suffering he meets with in every batch of mail, boasts an untouchably personal style, a scarcely transferrable personal vision. But more than that, it employs so packed, pointed, terse a method that in just 75 pages it creates the effect of a novel. Where most novels need to be cut down for the stage, Miss Lonelyhearts has had to be expanded, and the result is looseness, slackness and a substitute (and very weak synthetic) flavor.
Clearly, Adapter Teichmann intended no vandalism, but he was driven to it trying to make sense of Miss Lonelyhearts on the stage. And he has not made sense for all that. He has sadly simplified the story at the same time that he has complicated the storytelling. He has needed a mass of stage gimmicks, he has had to start farther back, he has made something too wooden of his hero and all but banal of his hero's going to pieces and his search for God; and instead of West's fever-confused, ironically violent ending, has wound up with straight bang-bang. He has softened some things, too. Obviously, a Miss Lonelyhearts can reach as lopsidedly morbid a view of life as an interviewer of nothing but sweepstakes winners might reach too cheerful a one. But Miss Lonelyheart's view fitted West's own savagely compassionate pessimism, and should remain inviolate.
Only with the gloatingly malevolent, Mephistophelean feature editor—well acted in a Front Page style by Pat O'Brien-does the play show any teeth. The editor makes a good stage villain; but the far greater villain of the book—life itself—never appears in the play.