Miss Lonelyhearts

The stage adaptation of Miss Lonelyhearts provides a torturous evening of theater, because the body of Nathanael West's wonderful novel has been ground up, its soul purged, and the resulting hamburg kneaded around a cast of very bad actors.

The novel Miss Lonelyhearts is the fierce portrait of a young man who laughingly undertakes a lonelyhearts column to provide human interest for the Chronicle. His cynical facade is cracked, and finally broken away by letters from starving mothers, sick breadwinners, and unwed pregnants; with love and reason for life lost, his mind founders, and he drives for death.

The city editor of the Chronicle, Shrike, slips through West's pages sticking the men about him on thorns; he is a complete sadist, whose quiet, corrosive words prick at Miss Lonelyhearts constantly. Pat O'Brien, tested veteran of countless barrel-bottom films, shouts. Playwright Howard Teichmann has promoted the novel's Shrike, with name changed to Spain, to rank with Miss Lonelyhearts himself, boring more holes in the plot's tight belt, as if to accommodate O'Brien's bulk.

As the young column writer whose search for meaning amid his readers' hopeless letters wears his life away, Fritz Weaver cannot hope to out-decibel bellow-mumble-grunt O'Brien; and his adapted lines haven't the edge to slice through to the audience; but this may not be all O'Brien's fault, for Weaver drowns in turbulent philosophical soliloquies which West raced over.

Only Janet Ward, as the frustrated wife of an impotent cripple, acts with any skill in snaring Miss Lonelyhearts in his own bed.

The men and women in the cast suffer from rigor mortis; their movements and voices are lifeless, and they read their lines. The play does, however, achieve a consistent dullness, which lets the drowsy theatre-goer sleep without fear of missing a thing.

The intermission string quartet played "I Could Have Danced All Night," and would have been horrible if the second violin had not been flat.