Empty Bed Blues

By T.E.Kalem

FATHER'S DAY by Oliver Hailey

Divorce is major surgery. Even if the operation is a seeming success, the patient is never quite the same. The prevalence of divorce has had an incalculable effect on the fabric of U.S. society, but our playwrights rarely broach the subject. A notable exception is Oliver Hailey. His Father's Day examines the scar tissue of pain; yet his play is saturated with wry, bitchy, gallant and sex-laced humor, the kind of hilarity that rises from the ashes of despair.

Eight years ago, this play opened and closed in one night on Broadway. Fate is likely to prove kinder this time, since the production is housed in the intimate surroundings of Manhattan's American Place Theater. Father's Day is nothing if not intimate. Initially, it may have been ahead of its time. Playgoers are probably more receptive now to hearing women talk openly of sexual desires and needs.

The three women in Father's Day have been left by their husbands. Their responses define their temperaments and personalities. Louise (Susan Tyrrell) is brash, her language is raw, and she is a comic spitfire. She is still in a towering rage over the divorce and harbors delusions of winning her husband back from his present wife.

Marian (Tammy Grimes) is ultracivilized, a paragon of taste and class. She holds no lasting grudge over the divorce and even goes to bed with her ex from time to time. Estelle (Mary Beth Hurt), the most recently separated, is bewildered and scarcely able to cope with the enormity of the experience. An orphan who married an orphan, she had a glowing faith that building a nest would be the golden tie that binds forever.

In Act II we meet the men who still occupy the holes in the women's hearts.

They are not so sharply etched as the women, but are reasonably engaging.

Marian's man (Lee Richardson) is a promiscuous boulevardier who swings both ways. Louise's former husband (John Cunningham) is a likable fellow, pugilistic only during the marital mismatch. Estelle's man (Graham Beckel) lives in an orphanage of the mind except that he now has a Du Pont to bail him out.

Too many glib one-liners sail across the stage, but mainly the drama cuts through the seas of postmatrimonial distress, casting a spray of laughter over the salty follies of sex.

T.E. Kalem

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