New Play in Manhattan

Maid in the Ozarks (by Claire Parrish; produced by Jules Pfeiffer) reached Broadway after five years of racketing about the country (TIME, March 29, 1943). Before running up the curtain, Producer Pfeiffer set a Broadway precedent by running down the play. Said his outsize newspaper ads: "The management of Maid in the Ozarks believes that the . . . critical consensus will be that this . . . is the worst play that has ever hit Broadway."

The critics readily obliged. The Mirror's tribute: "One of the . . . nastiest . . . exhibits ever to contaminate a theater." The Post's: "[The] ad's wrong, son. It's the worst play that ever hit any place."

If not the worst play in Broadway annals, Maid in the Ozarks is very likely the most needlessly disgusting. Though its publicity stresses sex, it contains little except the sort exemplified in a game of footie between two younkers known as Daisy Bell (Cecile de Lucas) and Thad Calhoun (Larry Sherman). Its long suit is actually scatology -- lice, bedbugs, belches, outhouses, bare and dirty feet planted on the breakfast table. These intended guffaw-getters are complemented by such basic hillbilly humors as drunken lechers, gabbling halfwits and twitching hags.

Despite consistently brutal reviews, Maid has played to six million people, and started Ozark-born Playwright Parrish on the way to becoming a hillbillionaire. In Manhattan last week, the management advertised "Seats Now Selling 8 Years in Advance," with "Special Spicy Mats. Sat. and Sun."

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