Watered Stock

Calculated Risk, by Joseph Hayes, tells of an old-line New England textile company facing a takeover threat from a corporate raider. At first, the play promises to be a Marquandian confrontation between people who possess character and those who merely flash credentials. It also promises to contrast an older type of businessman who manufactured a product of quality and backed it with his name, and a newer type of paper manipulator who merely juggles figures and jiggles stock with irresponsible anonymity. Unfortunately, these promises are not kept. What evolves is a faint melodramatic paraphrase of Playwright Hayes's The Desperate Hours; instead of a hoodlum holding a family at gunpoint for 48 hours, the corporate raider holds an entire board of directors at penpoint for the same time span.

During that time, each of the directors is forced to reveal to President Julian Armstone (Joseph Cotten) that he has a motive for being the raider's well-paid Trojan horseman. These revelations are not so much jolting glimpses of human frailty as they are dismaying exposures of gimcrack theatrical carpentry. The motive of the raider (Gerald S. O'Loughlin) is typically yawn-provoking. As a youngster he waited on table for "polite boys" in button-down collars, and has venomously turned the tables ever since. Hero Cotten is a kind of airborne Hamlet who has always eluded company and husbandly duties by taking off in his Beechcraft Bonanza. How he comes to terms with his hated father's cast-in-bronze ghost in belated monologues of love and loyalty is more embarrassing than heartening.

Playwright Hayes writes the kind of dialogue that turns English prose into watered stock. At one point, Cotten's wife says quiveringly to her husband: "The ground's shaking under us all, Julian.'' What she means is the play.

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