It’s been what they politely term a “thin” season on Broadway this year, a season far more memorable for its lows than for its highs. When set against the middlebrow melodrama of Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom and the sleepy bromides of Whoopi Goldberg’s white comedy, the breathtaking stupidity of some of the season’s more ill-fated offerings seemed unforgettable indeed.
Kicking off the season at the Music Box Theatre was Alone Together, a play about a middle-aged couple’s inability to rid their tasteful suburban house of a passel of grown-up children. Bred in the Theater of Empathy tradition, whose purpose is to hold, as ’twere, the mirror up to Topical Anxiety, Alone Together gave the audience a chance to see itself in the same old light the bedside table lamp has shed on all those eiderdown conversations about “where we went wrong, dear.” What tears of relief must have sprung to the eyes of countless middle-aged fathers on hearing Kevin McCarthy declare with debonair solidity, “We were fantastic parents: loving, giving and wise!” What thunder of applause from countless weary mothers on Janis Paige’s haunting cry: “The mother machine is all worn down!” (How skillfully she drew out those spondees!) Easily the most exploitive play in recent seasons, Alone Together was the sort of show that even Frank Rich couldn’t kill overnight—suggesting that where countless upper-middle-class parents “went wrong” was in having nothing more important to think about than their children, even at the theater.
November brought
