THE PLAYGOER

Ever since that momentous day when some psychologist discovered the Age of Adolescence and all its emotional trimmings, script artists and playwrights have done their wittiest to make America adolescent-conscious. Abby Merchant's "Your Loving Son", now on the middle leg of a summer theatre to Boston to New York itinerary, deals with adolescence of the precocious variety, the worldly-wise 16-year old boy whose teeming brain and sturdy hand carries the grown-ups through crisis after crisis. Despite a rather obvious lack of inspiration displayed by the author in mediocre lines and a transparent plot, "Your Loving Son" succeeds in maintaining an ambling pleasant pace with just enough spurt here and there to keep a blase Back-Bayer awake.

Full credit for this must go to an earnest cast which squeezes every situation to its last drop of laughs. Frankie Thomas is your loving son, and though you will certainly never have one like him, and probably won't miss the pleasure, he is a handy little lad when it comes to preserving the integrity and unity of that fine old American institution, home-life in New York. From dawn till dusk this knee-pant Trojan wages attrition warfare against the temptations to which his weaker-willed parents are subjected: a sheik-like artist in the case of his portraitgenic mother, and a dove-like matron innocently laying the net for his father. Lily Cahill, la mere; Jay Fassett, le pere, Eddie Nugent, le beau de L'arte;--these and the remainder of the cast are all quite adequate. But it is Monsieur Thomas, L'enfant terrible par excellence, who provides the freshness and snap "Your Loving Son" so badly needs, if it is not to wilt under the brightlights of Broadway.