Nostalgia Nut

By T.E. Kalem

THE CURSE OF AN ACHING HEART

by William Alfred

Some actors might be called the lion tamers of the theater. Katharine Hepburn may not be talking good sense in West Side Waltz, but when she puts her incandescent ardor behind any given sentence, you'd better believe it. Lauren Bacall is no great shakes as a dancer or singer, but when she fixes a playgoer with those tigress eyes, cool judgment succumbs to shimmering illusion.

Faye Dunaway belongs to this breed. After a 17-year absence in Hollywood, she returns to Broadway's Little Theater with a vehicle no sturdier than balsa wood, but she never lets the audience forget that she is driving it hell-bent on its voyage to nowhere. Author William Alfred, Abbott Lawrence Lowell professor of the humanities at Harvard, launched her on the road to stardom in his play Hogan's Goat, about political shenanigans among the Brooklyn Irish in the 1890s. Now back on the same turf, Alfred mounts a sentimental archaeological dig for nostalgic relics dating from the years 1923 through 1942.

Dunaway caroms onstage as a 14-year-old on roller skates and it may just be the larkiest moment of the poor girl's life. Orphaned all too soon, Frances Duffy is sent to live with a long-suffering aunt and an uncle (Bernie McInerney) bent on incest. When she strikes out on her own at 18, her luck with men is not conspicuously better. Eventually she weds a local Lothario (Terrance O'Quinn) who treats her to the bitter delights of being the wife of an alcoholic. Only her young son solaces her, and she counsels him that the race of life is not to the swift and the strong but to the survivor.

It does not help this 90-minute intermissionless drama that most key crises in Frances' life happen offstage or that so much time is spent with peripheral characters about whom one could not care less. The language bruises the ear, ricocheting between period brassiness ("There's one slick bozo," "There's this bimbo there givin' me the glad eye") to sorry flights of pseudopoetic home truths. On the other hand, the nickelodeon-like music of Claibe Richardson tickles the ear. Apart from Dunaway, the only one who threatens to run away with the show is Designer John Lee Beatty, whose delightfully real open-air trolley car crisscrosses the stage on real tracks. --By T.E. Kalem

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