Bedward Ho!

A Race of Hairy Men! by Evan Hunter. If homosexuality fouls the air in And Things That Go Bump in the Night, heterosexuality scarcely sweetens it in A Race of Hairy Men! Bump is fashionable and sick; Hairy Men is outmoded and slick. Both plays are bad, and they typify extremes of shallowness that leave the Broadway scene increasingly barren of authentic drama, honest emotion, and a conviction of reality. Broadway is stalemated between plays that cry in their beer and plays that munch cream puffs, between those that try to shock and those that aim to tease, between psychological freak shows and intellectual shell games. It is small wonder that people have been driven out of the theater when they find so little that is enduringly human in it.

The urge behind Hairy Men is human enough--sex. Two college boys and their girl friends borrow a Greenwich Village artist's studio for a weekend in hopes of satisfying that urge. They never do. The unalterable code of the bogus sex comedy forbids it: beds are props, not stops. It would be a joke to call Playwright Hunter's dialogue comic, though an attractive young cast paced by a wry comedienne named April Shawhan pumps stray laughs into the saggy script.

Displaying its customary sagacity, the public stayed away, and Hairy Men closed after four performances. What with all the practice the actors got folding and unfolding, making and unmaking beds, they could probably earn a decent living running a sleepshop.

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