The Temptation of Maggy Haggerty

James McGee, who wrote The Temptation of Maggy Haggerty, is apparently one of these militant archaists who believe that anything invented after the death of Thomas Aquinas is the work of the devil. In Mother Haggerty's boarding house the villains are a quack doctor, advocate of machines, printed matter and the like, and a bearded rummy, whose claim to infamy is his intellectualism. As I see it, McGee wants Man to stand up on his hind legs and bury contaminated products of the modern world in the good, clean earth.

Somehow it seems that rampant regression characterizes simple-minded zealots, incapable of comprehending a blueprint and frankly afraid of it. These are people fearful that machines will make hands useless and brains even less necessary. To escape from possible superannuation, they return, at least symbolically, to soil and unquestioning faith. It is an alarming literary trend that pushes humanity back to the slime, but it can sometimes provide good theatre.

Regrettably, The Temptation of Maggy Haggerty is not even good archaisni. Biased though I am, Maggy and most of her roomers seemed stock characters engaged in conventional situations. It was quite obvious that Maggy, flirting with the modern world, would end up renouncing the products of Westinghouse and General Electric for gadgets and religions more tried. There are some amusing scenes in the play, and a few of the performances are quite funny, but McGee's script crupts only in short bursts.

Actually, the best features of the play are its lighting and its single set, the inside of a rooming house. The set is partitioned into a basement, a ground floor, and a stairway leading to the upper stories. And director Martin Ritt uses the set and lighting, especially in scene openings and closings, to achieve startling effects.

Evelyn Warden as Maggy Haggerty, however, is so much the standard Irish washerwoman that every line she voiced sounded to me like "oooh, full faith and credit," but some of the other Irish, especially Phyllis Love as a sheltered young damsel under Maggy's wide wing, are able to vary their inflections with their emotions. In this respect, Salem Ludwig, as a roomer, beats them all; but he is supposed to be a Rumanian.

Somehow, I feel that McGee might have slipped his point across effectively with this same cast, if he had made his lines and situations a bit more subtle. A boarding house with a crew of eccentrics is a fine setting, but using television to represent the machine age and comic books printed matter is overloading the pack. Smashing an electric computer with a sledgehammer is certainly an effective way of stopping it; but it is much less wearing simply to disengage the plug from its socket.