"Bawdy! Lusty! Unashamed!"

For over six months Chicago has supported a hillbilly horror which advertises that it "Makes Tobacco Road Blush." Maid in the Ozarks, written by housewifey, Ozark-born Claire Parrish, is no spoof, but a serious mountaineerful. Though the management plays it up as "Bawdy! Lusty! Unashamed!" its real stock in trade is not sex but unsavoriness --bedbugs and bedroom crockery, belches and body scratching, hogcalls and outhouses, a halfwit boy who picks his toes on the breakfast table and rubs his face with worms.

The play, which two years ago had a hit-or-miss run in Los Angeles, was slow starting in Chicago. The critics were brutal, saying such things as "The Great Northern Theater is going to be a parking lot if it doesn't watch out." For months the enterprise squeaked through by selling two tickets for the price of one--mostly to high-school-age smirkers. In January it was set to close, but was taken over by a saloonkeeper and a hat-check man who abandoned the play's haphazard promotion for a frontal attack featuring sex. Lately, with $3,800 expenses, the play has raked in $10,000 a week, and a road company is being rehearsed. Its destination: war-busy, well-heeled Detroit.

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