Gilroy Is Here

For too long, it was more than a little disturbing that Edward Albee was the only new, young, serious dramatic voice on Broadway. But now another one, considerably lower and more firmly pitched, is being heard. The play is called The Subject Was Roses. And the playwright, Frank D. Gilroy, has developed his skills so thoroughly that his presence seems obviously durable.

He is a writer of remarkable finesse, for in outline his play is plotless and drab. The only son of a Bronx couple comes home from World War II, and with eyes of new maturity recognizes that although his parents love him, he has no home at all, since their marriage has long been an unsuitable alternative to death. But Gilroy's plain, familial triangle rings with insight and trenchancy. His people live. His ear is as good as Harold Pinter's and, like Pinter, he can put two or three people in a room, start them talking and sustain long successions of commonplaces that never subside in their fascination. Pulling all this burlap to threads, he reweaves it into a fabric that is still coarse but made to last.

Concrete Characters. Sharply handsome, touched with grey at the temples, neatly dressed, educated in the Ivy League and trained in television, Gilroy must trouble the sight of all the pale poets who feel that wine, whiskers and Paris are the only stimulants of art. He works in a little $30-a-month office on the main street of Goshen, near his home in Orange County, N.Y., where he lives with his wife and three sons.

He looks out his office window over a Civil War statue and creates dramatic characters that are no less concrete but nonetheless alive. Some people tell him that his meticulous realism is about that far behind the progress of modern playwriting.

"I haven't set out to reverse any trends," he answers. "The stories I have told so far tell best in a realistic way. I have nothing against the avantgarde. I feel little tendencies in myself bubbling in that direction. I thought I had darned well better be able to present living persons on the stage before I tried to distill and abstract them."

His new play, he says, "is frankly autobiographical." The father (played by Jack Albertson, a vaudeville comic who had never before done a serious dramatic role and whose stunningly right performance is worth a visit in itself) is a coffee importer. Gilroy's father, now dead, was a coffee importer and one of the best tasters in the busi ness. As a youngster, Gilroy used to go down to Front Street and watch his father tasting coffee, noting how all the phonies present would form their own opinions from his father's grunts and grimaces.

Margin Time. The family lived in a Bronx apartment house, where "we were often the only Gentiles." Frank went to De Witt Clinton High School on the 12:30-to-5 p.m. shift, did no work, barely got through, and had no intention of going to college. He was drafted into the Army in 1943, where he noticed that "the people who had the best jobs were people who had been to college." This sparked in him a sudden passion for higher learning. After the war, he applied to 40 colleges, asking them to gamble on him despite his high school record. All but two rejected him. Davis and Elkins College of Elkins, W. Va., was willing to admit him--and so was Dartmouth. He went to Dartmouth and graduated magna cum laude.

For unbearded writers, television is the modern garret. They starve there, but only spiritually. Young playwrights dip their fingers into its honey pots; then, if they have substantial spines, they retreat for desperate months of "margin time," writing their "own work" until money is needed again. After Dartmouth and a year at the Yale School of Drama, Gilroy made what he describes as "an all-out total assault on TV." He conquered. He has been all over the channels from Studio One to the Kraft Theater. With some movie work as well, he eventually had enough excess cash to take time off in 1957 to write Who'll Save the Plowboy? for off-Broadway production, an award-winning somber tale of a life saved in combat only to rot in peace.

Building Terms. The Subject Was Roses has a somewhat uncertain future.

It opened three weeks ago to clamorous raves. Gilroy was welcomed as "a major playwright." Walter Kerr said it is "quite the most interesting new American play to be offered on Broadway this season." Yet it is playing to audiences that could fit into a few lifeboats. Broadway cries out for excellence, but often sinks it when it comes along.

Curiously, however, the play may well build to a long and financially successful run. With just one modest set and three actors, it can break even merely by taking in $12,000 a week, or 27% of the theater's capacity. It is not grossing even that much yet, but its audience--which began with a pittance advance sale of $165--is promisingly growing. Broadway pros would have folded it, but Gilroy and his novice producer, Edgar Lansbury, are determined to take the gamble that the play will more than recover its present losses. "All these Broadway experts would like to write us off as an artistic success only," Gilroy says. "I want to be able to talk to them on their terms."

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