THE STORIES: Whisper into My Good Ear. According to Howard Taubman, the play "is a study of two old pensioners who find surcease from their fleabag of a hotel and their loneliness in meeting near the edge of a park lake. This time they have met to carry out an agreement to commit suicide together. Charlie is almost blind and full of truculence, the kind of man who resents the tree behind his back because it has been around 100 years and will outlast him. Max is gentle, introverted and, it develops, homosexual. Nothing happens between them, but the two talk—amiably, impatiently, bitterly—and reveal themselves and the sources of their despair." In the end the suicide pact is abandoned, at least for the present, for both men become aware that it is often enough just to be alive and to search each day for the values that even the most wretched can perceive. (2 men.)
Mrs. Dally Has a Lover.
Newsday (NY) says: "It has something of the quality of a Dorothy Parker sketch with its keen observations and deft portrait of a woman in love, knowing that this love cannot last. Mrs. Dally is well into her thirties, married to a man she despises and carrying on an affair with the teenaged son of a family living in the same tenement building. Despite its theme and its 'kitchen sink' locale, there is nothing sordid about Mr. Hanley's play. It has humor and an equal share of pathos. The boy is affectionate but inarticulate; the woman has larger dimensions in her efforts to sow romance and harvest beauty in barren soil. Her simple recital of the death of her only child, her reading of one of Donne's love poems, her performance on a trombone which she once played professionally, mix drama and comedy with skill and sensitivity. To me there was no false note in the touching one-acter." (1 man, 1 woman.)