Happy Though Anxious

By T.E. Kalem

FINISHING TOUCHES by JEAN KERR

The middle-aged male in a psychic or physical funk is very much in vogue this season on Broadway. We have seen that theme treated in That Championship Season and Butley, and now in Finishing Touches. Each of these plays fires off salvos of laughter, and yet each also imparts an unsettling mood of deep, free-floating anxiety.

The hero of Touches is a 43-year-old college English teacher named Jeff Cooper who is fretting about a full professorship. Jeff (Robert Lansing) comes home from the classroom one day and tells his wife Katy (Barbara Bel Geddes) that he is falling in love with a nubile student. Being the rare wife who is the first to know does not prevent Katy from being cataclysmically shaken by her husband's startling don't-kiss-but-tell confession. Bel Geddes beautifully conveys outward bravado and inner terror.

Katy's emotional world does not mend appreciably when her son brings home from Harvard an actress with whom he has been sleeping. This free and sexy spirit promptly propositions Jeff, and in his menopausal dither he runs off with her. It is a very short fling. After 25 platonic minutes he is back home, ready for a reconciliation.

There has always been a disconcerting rift in Jean Kerr's plays between the witty, wise and thoroughly honest statements she makes about domestic life and the artificial plot mechanics she adopts for the sake of happy endings.

In some ways, the emotional substructure of the play has more density and complexity than its surface. At one point, Katy says she wishes that it was 1948. This is not merely a wistful desire to be young again; it is a hunger for the relatively stable value system of that era.

The Cooper generation was taught to go to church on Sundays, to enter marriage, often virginally, on a till-death-do-us-part vow, to obey its parents and expect obedience from its children. For these familial and marital mores, the middle class has been mocked and undermined for years. Time may well vindicate Jean Kerr's conviction that innocence and responsibility are the best policies, and that the family is the quintessential social unit without which civilization disintegrates in anarchy. T.E. Kalem

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