Shaw with Water

The vast old movie palace sat on the Atlantic City boardwalk like an aging burlesque queen living on a Minsky pension. Fading nudes hung in the garish foyer; tired stars peeled off the blue-sky ceiling. The place was so big that a dusty curtain divided it in half, and on the working side there were still 1,310 seats. It was hardly the setting for an intimate, sophisticated new drama: Dear Liar, an adaptation by Actor Jerome Kilty of the famed letters between George Bernard Shaw and Victorian Actress Stella (Mrs. Patrick) Campbell. Nor was it precisely right for the stars: clip-toned Brian Aherne playing opposite no less a grande dame than Katharine Cornell, resplendent in velvet gowns by Cecil Beaton.

Yet, last week, 1,000 patrons--many of them conventioneering Rotarians--streamed into the theater each night to applaud the delicate Shaw-Campbell exchanges. Some fidgeted at the length: two full hours on a virtually bare stage. But almost everyone enjoyed the unfolding affair by letter, which began in 1899 when Actress Campbell was at the height of her beauty and Playwright Shaw at the beginning of his brilliance, and ended in 1940 when Mrs. Campbell died in bitter poverty and Shaw at 82 plaintively wrote: "I am too old, too old, too old!"

A fascinating tour de force, far tougher on its two actors than Broadway's current Two for the Seesaw, the play was further proof that Kit Cornell is still the most enthusiastic road-show actress in the business--and proof once more that Broadway is not the only satisfaction the U.S. has to offer its players.

Last week Dear Liar wound up a highly successful "dry run" of 43 performances, hitting all the stops from Arizona to Florida. Next October, Cornell and Aherne will launch an even more ambitious tour stretching from Boston to Los Angeles. Finally, at year's end, they will arrive on Broadway for four weeks, then hit the road again. Bookings to date: solid through May 1960.

Few players could stand the road pace gaily set by Cornell, 61, and Aherne, 56, and few would seem to have less incentive. Aherne has a profitable California grape farm, and hates the road--like nearly every modern U.S. actor (TIME, Feb. 2).

But he feels bound to support Actress Cornell, with whom he first co-starred in The Barretts of Wimpole Street in 1931. And to Actress Cornell the road is as much a magnet as when she ran a record 18,000-mile marathon of 77 cities with a repertory including Romeo and Juliet in 1933. "The road isn't what it used to be," she concedes. "You can't get private railroad cars, and there aren't any trains any more." But Cornell despises television, has never made a movie, and finds it increasingly hard to find a Broadway script that suits her. "So there I am, off again, carrying my bottled water." Shrugs Aherne: "She's wedded to the road, and I'm wedded to her."

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