New Play on Broadway

A Loss of Roses finds Playwright William (Picnic) Inge once again in the Middle West of a generation ago, portraying troubled, torn, anonymous lives. This time, he considers the jangled relationship between a widow (Betty Field) and her 21-year-old son (Warren Beatty), and what happens when an out-of-work tent-show dancer who had once been their maid (Carol Haney) comes to stay with them. The mother--whom the son deeply resents because he is too deeply drawn to her--had been happily married and, because of the boy's attitude, has given up marrying again. Aware of her own dangerous feelings toward her son, she has tackled their relationship wisely but not too well. When the pathetically buffeted dancer arrives, the son deludes himself that his salvation lies not just in an affair with her but in marriage. Then he leaves her high and dry, and, as the one way out, leaves his mother as well.

Playwright Inge has once again, with the help of a good cast, achieved his sharp little vignettes, his touching, muffled cries and lonely moments. In the mother he has created an interesting variation on a type, and in mother and son he has clearly sought to probe one of the most difficult and tangled of human relationships. That he has not done so seems due partly to method and partly to mood. The dancer's role, whatever its own interest or its catalyst value, somehow obstructs the son and mother story and keeps it from breathing. Into a short play, Inge has further tossed comedy bits involving theater types and neighbor boys, and a farcical bed-hopping drunk scene. As a result, mother and son never get deeply probed, never really come to grips. Something essential, whether cumulative small detail or a big scene, is missing. A climactic moment, such as the mother's refusing her son's deeply felt anniversary gift, half-sacrifices character to plot. The silver cord does not really bind Inge's story.

The play seems a little lonely, a little too distant from its materials, a little too given to mood. Music does service for speech; the Inge touches, the Inge faces, even where effective, seem overfamiliar. Perhaps the play's too plangent and elegiac title helps express what is unsatisfying about its text.

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