The Ponder Heart

Looking at The Ponder Heart is much like watching the village idiot for a couple of hours--the experience can be amusing, but it leaves a strangely bitter after-taste. The pitiful "hero" of the play, Uncle Daniel Ponder, is in fact a sort of village idiot of a small southern town. The inheritor of a vast estate, he grew to middle age without ever growing up. He spends his time playing with the local children, but some obscure loneliness finally drives him to marry a backwoods girl he picked up in a soda fountain. When the girl, who is even more childish than Ponder himself, dies under mysterious circumstances, he is indicted for murder. The trial provides tension for the plot.

Authors Joseph Fields and Jerome Chodrov, however, do not search for comical situations in a plot which obviously has none to offer. Instead, they unmercifully exploit the humorous possibilities of Ponder's eccentricity. As a result, it is practically impossible to laugh with a character who must have been whimsical when short story writer Eudora Welty first created him. One has to laugh at him if one is to laugh at all; a lot of cruelty lies hidden underneath the glib surface of the comedy.

David Wayne tries to restore some of the whimsey which Uncle Daniel lost in the transition from the short story to the play. He acts with an abandon very funny to watch, adopting a southern accent just sugary enough to be humorous without becoming cloying. His manner is full of comical inventions, except for some distracting gestures. But even Wayne, for all his talent, cannot make Daniel Ponder anything more than a pitiful, lost child.

The other actors get rather little chance to be funny. Una Merkel, as Uncle Daniel's niece, does her best for a character whom the playwrights have left somewhat vague. As the bride, Sarah Marshall gives an appropriate, if at times almost infuriating, impression of bottomless stupidity. The part of the prosecutor, a politician with flowing hair and flowing oratory, offers Will Greer some opportunity for comedy. Unfortunately, he overplays it.

In a sense, Greer's acting sums up the spirit of the production: too much of an only partially good thing. Fields and Chodrov have written a funny play but they have sacrificed the chance to make Daniel Ponder into a really appealing or meaningful human being in order to milk him for laughs. Their method is unscrupulous, and the result is not quite satisfactory.