(2 of 3)
Rhinoceros. Eugene lonesco's nonconformist satire manages to be at once obvious and somewhat farfetched, is nevertheless exhilarating theater.
A Taste of Honey. An episodic but effective, bitter-sweet look at the world's shabbiness.
All the Way Home. James Agee's Knoxville chronicle, A Death in the Family, is turned into poignant drama that retains much of the novel's poetry and power.
Becket. Fine performances by Laurence Olivier and Anthony Quinn help Jean Anouilh's rather superficial version of Murder in the Cathedral.
Irma La Douce. Saucy Elizabeth Seal is a charming chippy in a French musical that loses little in the translation.
Advise and Consent. Allen Dairy's bulky Washington chronicle makes an engrossing if superficial political melodrama.
Show Girl. A revue consisting mainly of Carol Channing. which is enough.
An Evening with Mike Nichols and Elaine May. Probably the funniest people on Broadway.
Off Broadway
Among the better evenings: Call Me By My Rightful Name, an interracial-triangle drama by a new playwright, Michael Shurtleff; The Connection, Jack Gelber's graphic re-creation of a junkies' pad; The American Dream, Edward Albee's surrealistic situation comedy; The Zoo Story, Albee's famed nuino a mano between Natural and Ivy League Man, running on a double bill with Samuel Beckett's lucid monologue, Krapp's Last Tape; Hedda Gabler, another excellent production in the Fourth Street Theater's Ibsen series; In the Jungle of Cities, a mystifying but thoroughly stimulating early play by Bertolt Brecht: and The Balcony, French Playwright Jean Genet's superb argument that the world is a mammoth cat house.
BOOKS
Best Reading
A Burnt-Out Case, by Graham Greene. The despairing architect hero of Greene's latest and best novel attempts to isolate himself from worldwide fame by retreating to a tropical leper hospital. Yet what he finds is a mirror image of himself and of the civilization he fled.
The Gouffe Case, by Joachim Maass. An engrossing tale of murder, featuring a sexually ravenous temptress, and set in the gaslit world of fin-de-siecle Paris.
The Watchman, by Davis Grubb. The author of Night of the Hunter stirs a new cauldron of horror.
Mid-Century, by John Dos Passes. The best novel from Dos Passos since his U.S.A. trilogy. The villain this time is big labor.
Resistance, Rebellion, and Death, by Albert Camus. The late lamented French writer had a conscience like a carpenter's level. In this book he applies it to Algeria, democracy, Christianity and totalitarianism, and his readings are brilliant as well as true.
In Pursuit of the English, by Doris Lessing. A comic nonfictional slice of English lowlife. Spiv, whore or shopgirl, Author Lessing knows them all.
Abandoned, by A. L. Todd. A 19th century foray north of the Arctic Circle in which only seven men lived to tell the grisly fate of the other 17.
If Thine Eye Offend Thee, by Heinrich Schirmbeck. This German novelist takes a bevy of ideas about science and modern life for a metaphysical roller-coaster ride.
Man's Desiring, by Menna Gallic. A Welsh math teacher fends off intellectual bean balls in an English university. Told with a charming gift of Welsh gab.