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Mary, Mary (by Jean Kerr) is bright with wit, as becomes the author of Please Don't Eat the Daisies. Moreover, it is wit with an engagingly friendly appeal that, without raising blushes or leaving scars, neatly jabs mankind and woman kind, husbands and wives, bigwigs and nitwits, Hollywood and Broadway — and not least, ladies who can be too witty for their own good. The heroine of Mrs. Kerr's otherwise pretty standard comedy is just such a girl, which is partly why the girl and her publisher husband are getting divorced. He has constantly worried about himself and she has constantly cracked wise about the worrying. But her frankness and his funk prove to be children of one mother—insecurity.
Though the husband is about to remarry, the play's outcome is obvious the minute his fiancee appears as a humorless devotee of health foods. Otherwise, the wife's admirer—an attractive movie actor —might, with his light and civilized personality, seem a serious and desirable threat. But, with two wives behind him, he is no longer the marrying kind; the husband and wife were never the divorcing kind; and Mary, Mary is not of a reverse-the-engines kind. As playwriting, Mrs. Kerr's originality lies in decor rather than design; as comments on life, her criticisms are lodged in her witticisms.
But her playwriting. fortified by a sound production, is smooth enough. Under Joseph Anthony's deft staging, a good cast, in which Barbara Bel Geddes as the wife and Michael Rennie as the actor particularly shine, outskates the thin ice of the narrative. If a drawback exists, it is the too thick icing of the bons mots. Playwright Kerr has a knack for scene writing but tends to let psychological Truth and Consequences turn into verbal pingpong.
She needs to curb somewhat a gift that most people sweat to acquire; meanwhile, Mary, Mary is very often funny and always likable.