A Quiet Place
Schubert Theatre, New Haven, CT, 11/23/55 — [four days]
Plymouth Theatre, Boston, MA; 11/28/55 — [four days]
Hanna Theatre, Cleveland, OH; 12/12/55
Nixon Thatre, Pittsburgh, PA; 12/19/55
National Theatre, WA; 12/26/55 -- [two weeks]
THE BOSTON GLOBE
Tyrone Power, Leora Dana In Julian Claman's Drama
November 29, 1955
By Edwin F. Melvin
Julian Claman's first Broadway play, "A Quiet Place," which brought Tyrone Power to the Plymouth last night, is a matrimonial problem drama that is well enough written so that you wish it were better. Its difficulty is what it never seems to get far enough beneath the surface. Its solution is less an answer to the problems involved than a conclusion arrived at by the decision of the playwright.
A handsome production has been provided by the Playwright's Company, with an unusually attractive setting in a villa on the Amalfi coast of Italy designed by Donald Oenslager.
The play has been skillfully directed by Delbert Mann in a smooth and polished style.
Mr. Power gives an able performance as Oliver Lucas, a successful young Broadway composer and lyricist who, like some of his predecessors on the stage, hopes to do something more worth while. Leora Dana, one of the most capable of the younger group of American actresses, contributes a careful portrayal of his high strung unhappy wife, Frances.
Halliwell Hobbes, a player whose ripened abilities have long been recognized, has an important part as Mr. Metcalfe, a retired author, neighbor to the American couple. A fourth significant role, that of a simple and affectionate Italian girl, Biagine, the daughter of the caretaker of the villa and his wife, is touchingly played by Susan Kohner, a highly promising newcomer.
Matrimonial friction between the Lucases soon become apparent as the play gets under way; but like Oliver the audience has some trouble in putting a finger on the underlying reason for his wife's discontent. As much as anything it seems to be jealousy of his absorption in his work and her feeling that she is no longer a necessary partner in his undertakings.
Before the play is ended Oliver has become involved in an affair with the tender-hearted, unsophisticated Biagine. It is here that Mr. Claman's lack of experience is most conspicuous. He has her parents conveniently disappear without explanation and, though she has become an object of sympathy to the audience, he leaves her at the final curtain without resolving the unhappy situation in which he has placed her.
Mr. Claman shows skill, however, in handling the dialogue.
He has a sense of humor, which is particularly apparent in some of the speeches that he has given to the retired author. the latter, for example, refers in courtly fashion to Oliver's decision to change from writing poetry to composing for successful Broadway musicals as rising "from the heights of poetry to the sublimity of royalties." Somewhat later, he finds an advantage in the phonograph, as something that has driven "the well-bred Victorian contralto from our drawing room."
He has given to Mr. Power a generally sympathetic part, expect for the unfortunate affair with Biagine. Miss Dana's assignment is more difficult and the character much less appealing. Both of them invest their roles with skill of their own in addition to the material with which the playwright has supplied them.
The two minor figures of the caretaker and his wife are competently filled by Dino Terranova and Ernestine Perrie, but neither is of great consequence in the development of the theme.
In general the play leaves more the impression of a vehicle for actors than substantial drama in its own right.
THE CLEVELAND PRESS
Stage and Screen
December 13, 1955
By Jack Warfel
In a magnificently lush terrace setting of southern Italy, six interminable scenes span a new, first play by Julian Claman, fittingly titled, "A Quiet Place" at Hanna Theater.
Concluding line to the long, monotonic drone of conversation, again with wonderous appropriateness, is "Let's go home!" a sentiment vigorously anticipated by a certain portion of the audience long before final curtain closure.
During the yawning stretch, Tyrone Power, acting a composer named Oliver Lucas, changes his shirt, trousers and shoes for each scene, indicating that far more action occurs back stage than on the sunny side of the set.
The cast is richly endowed with talent, good looks and determination and it is a vast waste of such valuable ingredients to stir them into Author Claman's fledgling flounderings.
According to program notes, Claman previously confined his playwriting talents to television where he authored many of the "Mr. peepers" scripts for Wally Cox. Possibly the Hanna production represents non-used portions of this television pleasure better adapted to the technique of Wally Cox than Tyrone Power.
As Composer Lucas, a musician burdened with domestic fracture Power, is assigned to throw himself over a piano keyboard at intervals is anguished portrayal of creative dawdling, accompanied by much beating of the brow and heaving of great sighs.
The resultant inspiration is a song he sings, "I'm in Love," music by Michael Urey, words by Julian Claman, the play's author. This song, however, represents no great strain on Claman's imagination in as much as the title phrase is merely repeated over and over from the song's beginning to end.
Power sings another ballad, "A Quiet Place," from Leonard Bernstein's opera, "Trouble in Tahiti," with equal effectiveness.
His singing voice impresses the audience no more than it does his colleagues in the play. "He sings with a composer's voice!" murmurs one character.
"Oh, how I wish I could sing!" cries another.
"My mother used to sing," declares a third person by way of dredging the conversational brilliance.
Occasionally the author's TV technique slips in with reference to this "aphrodisiac qualities of deodorants."
Acting wife to Power's depiction of the composer, Leora Dana, gifted Broadway, tries valiantly to pump realism into her lines as a frustrated, frightened wife incapable of presenting her husband with an heir.
Power creates a handsome trouble portrait and does heroically well with the dull little he is permitted to do.
Choice (if that's the right adjective) lines of the play are property of that splendid veteran of stage and screen, Halliwell Hobbes, who acts Metcalf, neighboring poet and friend to the anguished Frank and Oliver Lucas.
Everyone involved in "A Quiet Place" suffers because his wife looks constantly pinched. She suffers because Lucas tears at his hair. Blagina (Susan Kohner, certainly a beautiful girl) suffers because she loves Lucas. Metcalf suffers for everyone.
The aforementioned, spellbinding set, arrayed over three levels to present the living room, terrace and garden of an Italian villa near Amalfi, is the ingenious work of Donald Oenslanger and aside from his efforts all else on stage seems a tragic, tedious loss of potential ability.
THE CLEVELAND NEWS
Show Time
Power and 'Quiet Place' And Marriage on Rocks
December 13, 1955
By Arthur Spaeth
There is a slice of dialogue early in "A Quiet Place" at the Hanna in which the commercial theater is described as a thing of "hits and flops--and no room for anything in between." That I fear is Playwright Julian Claman n unexpected and unsuspecting prophecy about his new romantic drama flexing its muscles in pre-Broadway tryout.
But the destiny of a new play in that peculiar Broadway climate of fixed minimum grosses and theatrical landlords whose standard of drama is strictly weekly box office figures isn't either critical providence or responsibility this far west of the Hudson.
What is to be found on the Hanna boards is the thing. And that's an uneven but generally interesting drama of an American couple whose marriage has found its way into dangerous waters and their desperate groping to save it and themselves. Tyrone Power of the stage and cinema and Leora Dana act the beleaguered couple with shimmering craft and appeal to audience heart and mind.
Power Acting
For a graying critic who has watched Power across the years of his screen-spaced intermittent stage appearances, it is [a] warming experience to see his ever-growing stature as an actor. He plays the drama's still bashful composer-lyricist of Broadway musicals with quiet authority and fine insight for a hero caught in anything goes tender trap.
Dana Leora lights the bafflement of birth; torn by the growing belief that her husband no longer really needs her, and incapable of stemming the too-quick-to-tongue harsh thoughts that is the key characterization in this romantic dilemma.
Miss Dana Is Excellent
At best the role is beset with mistiness in the writing and the wife's problem is thinly premised as motivation for emotional pressures of a drama, that if not hackneyed certainly adds little freshness to an oft-explored theme.
If Miss Dana is aware of these shortcomings in her side, it is nowhere reflected in her vividly real portrayal of a distraught woman pushed to her emotional limits by inner torment and frightened groping toward a salvation for her marriage.
Caught in this emotional maelstrom, too, is an Italian girl, who falls in love with the composer. And that wise reticent neighbor, an aging English author, who falls heir to the problems of new-found friends. Susan Kohner illumines her lovely sinorina with child-woman's capacity for giving undemanding love. And Halliwell Hobbes is generous with his veteran's craft as the friendly author feeling his way on raw, tender hearts.
Setting Acts, Too
The excellence of these portrayals, as always, leaves the critic wishing for crystal ball aid in divining how much of them must be credited to the unseen Delbert Mann, of TV and cinema "Marty" celebrity, who directed "A Quiet Place."
Mr. Mann, we begin to suspect is one of those all too rare directors who can exact better than=best from his actors. Certainly he has marshaled cast script and that handsome (and efficient) Donald Oenslager cutaway villa-garden-cliff blue Mediterranean scene for the ultimate dramatic conflict and pictorial effect.
The Playwrights' Company under whose banner the Claman play is brought to stage life obviously has given the new playwright the maximum possible aid and comfort. That astute theatrical organization patently feels much more strongly about the drama's worth and its Broadway fate than I do. I sincerely hope they are right and that I am wrong. I long since have wearied of the New York theatrical real estate deal that leaves no room for the little but well-acted entertaining play. I dislike that hit-or-miss state of the professional theater.
CLEVELAND PRESS
The Quiet Place Will Have Tryout at Hanna
By William F. McDermott
Owing to the diligence of the press agent, Walter Alford. I have a wealth of material on the new play,
"The Quiet Place," which opens at the Hanna Theater tomorrow evening prior to this New York engagement.
It is produced by the Playwrights' Company, which is usually a warrant of artistic merit.
This organization which was formed some 17 years ago has presented such plays as "Abe Lincoln in Illinois." Darkness at Noon," "The Four Poster," "Tea and Sympathy" "Bad Seed," "there Shall Be No Night" and "Cat a Hot Tin Roof," a present Broadway success which won both the Pulitzer prize and the Drama Critics award.
Poor Judges of Own
Many other of the Playwright's productions have been singled out as the best of the season by either the Pulitzer committee or the New York dramatic Critics Circle.
Dramatists are supposed to be poor judges of their own plays, and they sometimes are. But the general objection of the Playwright’s' Company, which was formed and is supervised by some of America's most successful dramatists, is usually sound.
They have had failures, of course, but their record for choosing plays which are both good and popular is better than that of the businessmen of the theater.
First Broadway Play
the new play, "A Quiet Place," is the first Broadway play written by Julian Claman. He is 37 years old. His wife is Marian Seldes, who is featured in the current Broadway success called "the Chalk Garden." Claman has taken a turn at being an actor, stage manager, press agent, war correspondent, television producer and script writer.
He says, "I met Marian two years ago as neighbors on Cap Cod. I had decided to learn more a bout her way of life. It seemed simple: I would write a play....I set aside two hours every day to tackling my first, "A Quiet Place" was the result.
"If it's any god, I have a lot for which to thank the girl who became my wife, for her encouragement, her practical counsel, her knowledge of what actors can do and say."
Directors
The director of their forthcoming lay, Delbert Mann, is also a newcomer to the theater, although he has staged ore than 100 plays for television. Some theater people are worrying about the lack of new directors. they seem to be an abundant crop. [ ]ford lists 15 of them who have maintained good assignments or who [...] masters such as Guthrie McClintic, Joshua Logan, Gilbert Miller and Harold Clurman. But there are plenty of newcomers with their own kind of talent and understanding. Nearly every actor that I know would like to be a director, and some of them, such as
Alfred Lunt, are excellent in the special function.
Balances Production
I remember the time when a star actor always directed his own company. The outside director, who has an important function in the theater, is a development of relatively recent years.
He adds to the sensitivity, the overall quality of a production and the balance of all its parts. the old time star and manager was primarily interested in his own role and usually tended to diminish the contributions of his subordinates.
Tyrone Power is the star of "A Quiet Place" and he will bring in some customers because of his long career in the films and his brilliant stage performances. He was last seen here with Katharine Cornell in Christopher Fry's play, "The Dark is Light Enough."
THE BOSTON GLOBE
Daughter of Tyrone Power's Friend Proved Right for Role in "A Quiet Place"
[author unknown]
An intensive search in New York and Hollywood for a young actress to play the featured role of the Italian girl, Biagine, with Tyrone Power in Julian Claman's play, "A Quiet Place," ended with the signing by the Playwrights' company of Susan Kohner, of Los Angeles, a newcomer to Broadway. Along iwth Leora Dana and Halliwell Hobbes, Susan Kohner will be featured in "A Quiet Place," which plays a pre-Broadway engagement of two weeks at the Plymouth theatre starting Monday.
Although author Claman and director Delbert Mann had combed dramatic schools and off-Broadway productions and agents in New York [searching by the] producers search for the rightr Blagine, in walked the Kohner's daughter Susan, whom Tyrone Power had been conscious of only a s a prtty child.
But here was a self-possessed young lady, about to enter her sophomore year at UCLA. Tyrone Power asker her if she had ever throught of the stage, and learned that 18 year old Susan was majoring in dramatics, had acted Italian girls in two stage production in Los Angeles, in "the Girl on the Via Flaminia" at the Circle theatre when she was 14, two years ago at the Players' Ring in "The Rose Tatoo," and had just made her film debut as an AItalian in the current Audie Murphie screen biograhy, "To Hell and Back."
THE SPRINGFIELD SUNDAY REPUBLICAN, Springfield MA
Stage & Screen News-Here and there in the Theater
Tyrone Power's New Play
December, 1955
By Louise Mace
Those who will recall Tyrone Power's impressive reading of several characters in the company presenting "John Brown’s body" two seasons ago at Court Square, are entitled to feel sad about his current stage venture.
The report from here is that "A Quiet Place," which opened at New Haven's Shubert theater and which this courier saw a week ago Saturday, is disappointing. It is not a full-bodied play, but a situation given sterile dramatization. While Mr. Power and his costar, Leora Dana, play with insight and delicacy, their vehicle shows them no gratitude.
Julian Claman, the author, is one of the more successful writers of television dramas. He has yet to understand and master the requirements of the larger and ore demanding textbook of the stage. Home viewers may accept, because there is no alternative, skeletonized themes and their abrupt conclusions, but theater audiences will not. Where an incident, if cleverly inflated, suffices as a half hour's TV entertainment, there must be more substance to one presuming on footlights habitations.
Too Familiar
Dramatic Claman has a familiar situation dependent upon the injection of a too familiar
incident - a flash-in-the-pan affair between an unhappy husband and a young, inexperienced Italian girl who has come to adore him. This not unusual circumstance is surrounded by intelligible but inactivated text mostly concerned with the wife's emotional instability and irritability. Well spoken thought it is by Mr. Power and Miss Dana, and also by that knowing stage veteran, Halliwell Hobbes, as an English expatriate, it becomes increasingly repetitious.
the couple have taken a villa on the Amalfi Drive, the husband in the hope that this picturesque retreat will impart its romantic spell and bring them back together. They have lost their baby and the wife cannot have another child.
Her despondency will not yield either to commonsense or to her husband's infinite patience and undeviating devotion. At times, too, she sinks into unreasonable moods or bursts into childish tantrums, and in one of these, she slaps her husband. At least it is something of a relief from the endless talk, a flash of action that alerts the audience to the hope of a further show of dramatic vitality. Unhappily, it is not realized.
But to Return
[..]The wife announces that she is going to Rome, and with a sure implication she will never return, she leaves him to the gentle mist rations of the pliantly eager Biagina, daughter of the villa's caretaker. The wife does return, and in time to sense the new relationship. But is so patently maneuvered and her promise to reform so hastily expressed as to lack assurance. This is typical of television's drama technique.
Miss Dana is too fine an actress not to search for all possible conviction in her character. Since dramatist Claman paints her as a woman turned in on herself, and feeling extremely sorry for herself into the bargain, hers is an unrewarding task. Because her husband, a successful
Broadway composer and lyricist, has no further need of her advice, she feels left out; so she frets and stings him with reproaches. Mr. Claman makes the character less than adult and seemingly verging on mental disarray.
Mr. Power's performance has quiet strength and naturalness. Susan Kohner, as the 19 year old Italian maid, is grave and appealing. Delbert Mann's direction is in properly muted tone, and Donald Oenslager's single set, for their Playwrights Company's production is decorative and atmospheric. The story itself is barren.
THE EVENING STAR
Tyrone Power's Play Garland of Cliches
Washington, DC
Tuesday, December 27, 1955
By Jay Carmody
Unless is it quickly sold to a new owner, or rented to a new tenants, New York theatergoers will get no chance to see one of the drama seasons most striking settings.
This is the one in "A Quiet Place," starring Tyrone Power which opened a week's date at the National Theater
last night. The present occupant of the striking premises created by Donald Oeslander—a new place by Julian Claman—is clearly doomed.
Its theme is once more that one of marriage on the rocks and its single distinction is that these happen to be the rocks of Italy's Almafi coast. These may very well be the most breathtaking of their kind anywhere. They are of no service, however, to a marriage that young Mr. Claman could not have been his purpose.
In the course of the play's two spiritless acts, "A Quiet Place" misses not a single cliché of its type, sputtering outward from that made much too immortal by Adam and Eve. Whatever happened to us, darling? What happened to then of course, is that he became a successful author of musical comedies, didn’t need her any more, and bang. Or more precisely, poof.
Some quite reputable names so tumbling down the Amalfi cliffs with Mr. Power in "A Quiet Place." The casualty list will also include Miss Leora Dana. Among young actresses, Miss Dana has seemed the perfect wife until Mr. Claman.
Even more startling perhaps is the frustration of Delbert Mann. He is the young director who made "Marty" a work of art on television and followed up with a prizeworthy film version, "A Quiet Place," is too much for him to cope with, too.
For the record and much more usefully as a warning to other young playwrights, this is a summary of Mr. Claman's thesis:
An attractive young couple whose marriage has run into the troubles attendant upon professional success, lease of a dream retreat on the Amalfi cliffs. A spot of escape therapy, flight from the Broadway glamour mob, may renew the simple glory they found in each other back in their days as slaves in an advertising agency. It does, too, but only for the first few minutes while they are being numbed by the view of the Mediterranean.
Once they turn around and se each other again, the bickering begins again. An old philosopher who lives a ledge or so higher up the hill injects his peaceful presence into their live. This is no help. An Italian servant family, middle-aged parents, and budding daughter infuse the atmosphere with their earthy laughter. This makes things worse, far worse when the girl's zeal to comfort the husband does succeed in diverting him.
It is not in the nature of Amalfi's elemental loveliness, however, to accept defeat by two neurotic Americans victimized by success. Its climate sets to work on their tension and its simple people by their example make clear the folly of the code of getting ahead. If only Mr. Claman had found a less lifeless way of describing its enchantment.
THE WASHINGTON DAILY NEWS
ALL LAID OUT AND NO PLACE TO GO
Tuesday, December 27, 1955
By Tom Donnelly
There is no point beating a dead horse, if you will allow me an opening remark which is not original but fits the case exactly. Julian Claman's "A Quiet Place" (at the National) was announced to close before it opened. On Saturday next the work will be buried by its sponsors. Permanently, if they want my opinion.
Still, there is a lot of white space yawning before me, and post-mortems can be fun, as Hercule Poirot said when he visited the London Morgue to test his theory that that Duchess of Bellhaven had not been run over by an omnibus in the fog, as stupid Scotland Yard thought, but had been dropped from a balloon by one of the girls at St. Trinian's.
I shouldn't be surprised if Mr. Claman's trouble is that he has been writing from life. His hero is a terribly successful composer of popular music who has taken up temporary residence in a villa in
Southern Italy, where he hopes to create tunes that will be a trifle silkier than those he has confected in the past. In fact, he hopes to turn out stuff at least as good as, say, Leonard Bernstein's.
DISCORD
Mrs. Composer is the harp in his hopeful harmony. For two years now, as the bank account has piled up, she has gotten progressively down in the dumps. She does not feel needed. The chef at Chambord can cook a better meal for her husband than she can, and his agent can give him better career advice, at 10 percent, than she can, and there are no babies on her horizon. So she drinks a little too much, and nags a little too much, and.... (Isn't that part of a popular song? Now I wonder who wrote that one? Gus Kahn? Walter Donaldson? Harry Ruby?)
I'll bet you a caviar and smoked sturgeon club sandwich that Mr. Claman, who is a television writer and producer and director, knows lots of people who have just these problems and behave just this way. I'll also bet you that whenever Mr. Claman sees them coming he suddenly remembers and urgent appointment somewhere else. It isn't just any old slice of life that's worth serving up on a silver platter. Some slices are fit for nothing but the disposal. And when we get to the theater we want to find ourselves in the company of people who are brighter than we are, or more melodramatic than we are, or more melodramatic than we are, or at any rate more fascinating than we are.
OFF-STAGE THRILLS
To give him his due, Mr. Claman has managed a few reasonable highlights [...]. Tyrone Power does a sufficiently job of acting as the composer, though I confess I can't imaging what he was thinking of when he assumed this heavy professional burden. You'd figure that after a tussle with "The Dark is Light Enough" last season he'd have been in the mood for a little action.
Leora Dana tries hard to make the wife who is dissatisfied with furs and jewels and motor cars and villa and Mr. Power and plenty of servants and Italian ham and melon for breakfast a sympathetic figure, but it's scarcely to be wondered at that she doesn't really succeed. Halliwell Hobbes does his elegant best as a retired English novelist who drops in every hour on the hour to find out what has been going on and express his deepest regrets. Nothing has been going on, but that doesn't halt his regrets, not by a particle. Susan Kohner is the Italian charmer, and she fills the bill in every direction.
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