Grand Lawsony

He jests at scars that never felt a wound.--Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare.

In Atlanta last week men jested at scars who most decidedly had felt a wound. In a Red Cross recreation hall, patients at the Army's Lawson General Hospital staged a rowdy revue called Grand Lawsony in which they kidded hospital life, Army red tape, and their own injuries. Most of the actors, and three of the four authors, were amputees.

Of the 600 people in the audience, about a hundred were nervous girls invited to a dance after the show. The rest were patients, most of them in wheel chairs or on crutches, canes and artificial legs. Guffawing noisily and applauding wildly, they found the show very taking and apparently therapeutic. To outsiders, however, Grand Lawsony was so grim and painful at times that it seemed more like Grand Guignol. After an opening cancan by Red Cross nurses, the show shifted to a foxhole where a one-armed G.I. dubbed Manny Tomville dreams of ordering "breakfast and a blonde to match," is rewarded with pirouetting amputees dressed as girls. Other scenes:

P: A pint-sized medic tries to lift a husky wounded G.I., yells "Gimmee a hand, somebody." The G.I. (played by a one-armed veteran) promptly offers his own "blown off" hand.

P: On a dimly lighted stage, a doctor appears to draw sausages and a balloon out of a G.I.'s gaping shoulder--while an announcer tells a ghost story.

P: During a pompous colonel's illustrated lecture on aircraft recognition, a soldier slips in a blow-up of a scantily clad girl, converting the lecture into a bedlam of double-entendres ("This model is stripped for action," etc.).

P: A one-legged G.I., impatient to walk again, hops out of his hospital bed, leaps over the footlights, kangaroos expertly through the audience.

The wounded thespians had so much fun producing Grand Lawsony that they cooked up ruses to delay the opening. There was 100% attendance only once: when mail call was held on one side of the rehearsal hall, and pay call on the other.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.