Game Loser

By T.E. Kalem

A TASTE OF HONEY by Shelagh Delaney

In this drama, life is a prize ring without winners. Survival is all. The characters hit the canvas, but they never stay down for the count. Their heads are bloodied, but there is a salty irrepressible humor on their lips. In sum, A Taste of Honey is a profile in the beleaguered courage of outcasts.

The play was first produced in New York in 1960 when British Playwright Delaney was 21. Then, the play seemed to belong to the "kitchen sink" school of regurgitative grievances--today, it celebrates spunk. This revival, which off-Broadway's Roundabout Theater has transferred intact to Broadway's Century Theater, is taut, vital, moving and funny. An admirable cast threads reality through the needle's eye of truth.

The plot might sound sudsy but it has a sting unknown to the soaps. Helen (Valerie French), a middle-aged lady of slippery virtue, deserts her teen-age daughter Jo (Amanda Plummer) to marry a piratical con man in a Hathaway patch (John Carroll) who is visibly her junior. Jo, a kind of spitfiery waif, gets involved with a black sailor (Tom Wright) who ships out leaving her pregnant. A good Samaritan homosexual (Keith Reddin) moves into Jo's dreary unheated flat to care for her.

Sometimes bitter, sometimes buoyant, Jo is valiantly unresigned to the acrid facts of her life. She fences with her mother, lover, stepfather, friend and fate. Plummer invests her with an unfaltering pulse beat of humanity that radiates through the actress and her fellow players to every member of the audience.

--By T.E. Kalem

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