The Theme Is Thorns

The Subject Was Roses, by Frank D. Gilroy. It takes a quiet patience to hear a heart beat or skip a beat. It takes the gentlest of touches to put a compassionate finger on the place where people love and hurt one another, the spot where the human skin is less than skin-deep. As Who'll Save the Plowboy? suggested in 1962, and as The Subject Was Roses further confirms, Frank D. Gilroy is the sort of playwright who possesses these qualities.

The Subject Was Roses but the theme is thorns, the barbed bloodletting that drains away the lives of people who live within the intimacy of the family without being intimate. Ostensibly, the moment is an occasion of joy. Timmy Cleary (Martin Sheen), son of John (Jack Albertson) and Nettie Cleary (Irene Dailey), has come home safe from World War II. Curt with one another, the parents both love the son and engage in a competition for his affections. But the boy has come back with a stubborn thirst to be his own man. In petty and profounder ways, things go wrong.

Timmy wounds his mother by forgetting that waffles used to be his favorite breakfast dish and enrages his father by refusing to attend Mass. More threateningly, he has sensed some of the sources of his parents' snarlingly bad relationship and is eager to discover more. The revelations come steadily but not patly. The frustrations of wife and life have made John irascible, intolerant and bitter. Nettie is sad-eyed, stiff-bodied, and given to sulky silences. She has ruled the family by veto power; he, in turn, has mutilated his wife's heart with incessant drinking and the pursuit of "hotel-lobby whores." Trying to cast up a balance sheet of guilt, Timmy blames first one parent, then the other.

But when he prepares to leave both he measures his maturity by showing that he is able to forgive, accept and love them as they are. Like his hero Playwright Gilroy has the clarity of insight to recognize that it is not the sin of the fathers or mothers that are visited on the sons, but certain almost immutable patterns of human temperament and behavior that are repeated and repeated and repeated and for which no one can rightly be blamed.

The intensity of feeling that Gilroy achieves in Roses is sometimes choked off by the drab, laconic, colloquial dialogue his characters use, and a few bursts of eloquence might have been risked to vary the tempo of speech. Whoever chose Sheen, Dailey and Albertson for their roles must have been working under a sign of the zodiac favorable to perfect casting, and Ulu Grosbard's direction belongs in the category of craft that conceals craft. In The Subject Was Roses, Broadway has that rarest of dramas, a play that dares to show its face, and not its heels, to reality, and to life.

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