Twin Beds

There is a nasty little slur on the theatre and popular taste playing at the Wilbur. Called twin Beds, it is dedicated to the Proposition that people of limited theatre-going experience will enjoy smutty leers and painfully-stressed innuendoes. The audience, seduced by a flood of "complimentary" tickets offering admission at half price, is mainly composed of giggling secretaries and their beaux in tic-less sport shirts: all alive to the glamour of a theatre first night.

The advertising boasts "The original New York cast"-cunningly masking the players' well-deserved obscurity by mentioning no names. Authors-or, more accurately, collectors-Salisbury Field and Margaret Mayo-have created an amalgam of petty and trite attacks on the seventh Commandment interlarded with witless and fatigued dialogue. It takes a whole act to establish the fact that a chubby blonde is overly matey with the males in her apartment house and that her husband doesn't particularly like it. In fact, he insists on moving to another apartment. But the long arm of concidence reaches about corners to chuckle the chin of dame Fortune, and we learn that two unwholesome specimens are taking their wives to the same new apartment.

During most of the second act there is nothing. No jokes, no clever lines, not even significant exposition. We find that the demonstrative couple has moved into a poorly furnished 9cheap, ill-constructed set) new apartment and that the former neighbors have moved in, too Thus we have pushed through forty minutes of tedium to the point of the act One curtain.

I left before Act Three.

Fighting their dirty way through this negligible plot the actors treat their parts with the lack of delicacy and taste that can be expected of their-rate talents. Enough it is to list some of their stage names: betty Bartley, Adrienne Angel, John Shanks. Only Nina Olivetti seems to have the faintest idea of what acting is all about. This she shows by winking broadly at the audience whenever she gets off a particularly sly dig at decency.

Unfortunately, the mess seemed to be quite popular with the audience.