Final Score

In the playhouse, the 1954-55 Broadway season was by no means distinguished.

But over the bridge table, or during the fish course, it proved one of the liveliest in years. For it was a season that spawned gossip and started talk, that one week provided novelty and the next week made news. The play that won both the Pulitzer Prize and the Critics' Circle Award--Tennessee Williams' Cat on a Hot Tin Roof --became most famous for telling a dirty joke about an elephant, and then cut it out of the script in the name of decency.

The season's first smash hit, The Boy Friend, saw its author locked out of rehearsals with a detective guarding the door. Silk Stockings was more spotlighted during its harassed tryout than are most hits at the peak of their run. Such so-so plays as Anastasia and Inherit the Wind packed enough second-act wallop to have the whole town talking. House of Flowers featured gorgeous rival bordellos, Lunatics and Lovers a bubble bath onstage.

The season's chief trend was less toward sex, however, than toward good old-fashioned theater, often with an Age of Violence twist. Unabashed in dialogue if a bit evasive in theme, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof had Williams' usual plunging force and reckless, unbraked use of it. Maxwell Anderson's harrowing The Bad Seed (about an eight-year-old murderess) wallowed in pain for pain's sake, used tragedy for matinee shudders. Though effective, it never provided--as did Joseph Hayes's The Desperate Hours--the exhilarating tingle of a good thriller. A tidy whodunit, Agatha Christie's Witness for the Prosecution made murder a pleasure.

The season's one good comedy, William Inge's Bus Stop, was its most generally satisfactory play. If clearly small-scale work with a touch of formula about it, it made up in vividness and humor for what it lacked in originality and depth. Comedy otherwise was never more than spottily bright. Clifford Odets' The Flowering Peach had engaging scenes but an eventual monotony, while a succession of Rainmakers and Reclining Figures rained too frequently or reclined too long.

Among musicals, the most winning were the first and last to open--The Boy Friend and Damn Yankees. Silk Stockings and Fanny were both lavish and hollow; more rewarding were House of Flowers, which bloomed brightly before it drooped, and Plain and Fancy, which had a nice Pennsylvania Dutch tang if not always enough musicomedy verve.

Amid the usual carnage, only one play died a hero's death: Graham Greene's short-lived The Living Room, which, though it ultimately failed, at its best had real distinction. Blatantly among the missing were the theater's classics: on Broadway proper, there was not a single revival of an important drama.

Compensation--in terms of revivals and a good deal else--came from off-Broadway. Last season's white hope, the Phoenix Theater, turned a rather dull grey --though thanks to Comic Nancy Walker, who was very funny when she had material and in places when she hadn't, the largely uninspired revue. Phoenix '55, made a dent. But far funnier was the off-Broadway Shoestring Revue; and there were such other achievements as Jean Anouilh's gay and witty Thieves' Carnival, a stylish revival of Congreve's Way of the World, a sensitive revival--in Stark Young's admirable new translation--of Chekhov's The Three Sisters. Despite much that is amateurish or pretentious, off-Broadway increasingly ministers to sound minority tastes; these days, indeed, dramatic caviar is only to be had cafeteria-style.

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