The Egghead (by Molly Kazan) is a contemporary play about a not-very-contemporary-minded professor. Hank Parson is full of high-minded intolerances, grants his seemingly dumb wife the freedom of thought to agree with him, chants ancient war cries while ignoring current wars. Then the FBI comes investigating a favorite former student of his, a brilliant Negro. Certain that the student is not a Communist and equally certain why he is being smeared as one, Parson rushes to his defense and brings him to the college to speak. All too soon, by way of his wife's sleuthing, the professor learns that the student is a Communist.
The Egghead is almost always interesting and with Karl Maiden and Lloyd Richards as the Liberal and the Communist, rewardingly well acted. Again and again it vitalizes the issues at the same time that—with small talk and small children, dinner-party fiascos and marital spats—it humanizes the atmosphere. What it does not do—what a message play so seldom can do—is to create flesh-and-blood characters who really seem to shape and chart their own lives.
One reason in The Egghead is a matter of plot. Basically—with its tale of a cocksure know-it-all who is being royally had and is only saved by his bird-brained wife (Phyllis Love)—the plot is a staple of artificial comedy and farce. But here the tricks and artifices are applied, with considerable loss in credibility, to something serious and real. Moreover, as anything but a purely comic butt, the professor seems just a little too wet behind the ears and behind the times.
And for all her plotting. Playwright Kazan, onetime play reader for the Theatre Guild and wife of Director Elia Kazan, must eventually abandon action for argument. This means a drop in dramatic force. Thus, when the student unequivocally assures his worried benefactor that he is not a Communist, he seems morally much more horrifying than when, later on, he gives all the reasons why he is one. In the last act The Egghead becomes a lively enough symposium, but in any creative sense it really ceases to be a play.
Romanoff and Juliet (by Peter Ustinov) is the sort of title that suggests it might have inspired the rest of the show. In any case, the show itself—a comedy laid in "the smallest country in Europe" —has the Soviet ambassador's son and the U.S. ambassador's daughter falling madly in love. It has the two embassies in a predictably farcical tizzy over the news, and it has Actor-Playwright Ustinov, as the bearded, pince-nezed, messily over-adorned head of the country issuing directives to his two-man army, lending a sly hand to the romance and rushing back and forth between the embassies to confide secrets they already know.
Actor Ustinov is an adroit comic whom Playwright Ustinov knows how to write for, and with his spiels and shrugs and sallies, his air of heading a second-rate fraternal order rather than a country, he is frequently fun. He scampers about with the careless aplomb of a musicomedy star.