The Tender Trap

For about six and a half minutes, The Tender Trap is a comedy. The play runs considerably over two hours. And this ratio makes one wonder if the standard Boston remedy of pruning the script will be quite enough. After a thorough job, the director would be left with but one scene and a few scattered chuckles, intermittent moments when The Tender Trap thrusts through the cultivated banality which marks 23/24s of it.

On the face of it, the production looked like a sure winner. The cast stars Kim Hunter and Ronny Graham, no longer the New Face he was when Leonard Sillman discovered him, but a slicker performer. And Max Shulman was in on the writing. Besides, it is the first comedy of the new season and the theatregoer set off, hope springing autumnal in his breast.

The first curtain soon batters that hope. The cast strides back and forth about the stage, tearing into marriage and cold pills--the two whipping boys of the plot. Actually, this discussion is inoffensive, the kind of vapid pleasantries you would expect to hear from likeable people bantering between themselves. It is nothing for 1,000 people to be eavesdropping on. When the hero's lady love absents herself saying she'll be gone an hour and will count the minutes, the hero rejoins, "There should be sixty." And so it goes.

The only scene sure to delight involves a beautiful showgirl with a crushed-rock voice named Parker McCormick. Miss McCormick plays one of Graham's discarded loves and while she perhaps wouldn't wear well, her few minutes save Act II. Since this act also contains those painful episodes when the play becomes preachy, Miss McCormick's achievement takes on heroic proportions.

Her colleagues struggle just as gamely, but their paths are more cluttered. The Tender Trap may well be one of the best-acted of all bad plays. Graham mugs and ingratiates simultaneously. Kim Hunter, playing a thirtyish career girl, adds a trim sophistication which balances Graham without neutralizing either role.

Preston Foster, as a surburban husband fed up with his wife, three children, and his wall-to-wall carpeting way of life, could not be more harried and sincere. By the end of the evening, however, his carpet fixation has become only an intra-mural joke.

It may come as no surprise that in the final jumble, marriage is at last upheld; matrimony has, after all, been around a long time. The Tender Trap, if there is justice along 45th Street, will not be.