Word: showgirl
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Born. To Harry James, 52, top trumpeter and bandleader in the '40s and early '50s, now playing in Las Vegas, and Joan Boyd, 28, former showgirl he married last December: a boy, their first child; in Las Vegas...
...Period of Adjustment. The three characters who constitute the cast are scarcely well adjusted. Lot (Brian Bedford) has come home to the Delta to claim the decayed house and rich land bequeathed to him by his mother. He brings with him his two-day bride, a jittery ex-showgirl named Myrtle (Estelle Parsons), without having told her that they will confront his half brother Chicken (Harry Guardino). He is partially of Negro blood, and has lived in the house and slavishly farmed the land for years...
...sexmates. The dialogue is surprisingly colloquial for Williams and lacks the requisite venom or eloquence. Most damagingly of all, the play becomes a sleepwalking tour of the dusty attic of memory. Between coughing bouts, Lot recalls his Oedipalsy life with mother, and Myrtle shuffles through an account of her showgirl days with the Five Hot Shots from Mobile. The actors are uniformly admirable, and Estelle Parsons (Buck Barrow's wife in Bonnie and Clyde) is more than that as she makes of Myrtle a tender, vulnerable woman of tattered gallantry and frail flesh...
Married. Harry James, 51, top trumpeter and big-band leader in the 1940s and early '50s, now making the Las Vegas scene swing; and Joan Boyd, 27, former Vegas showgirl; he for the third time (the others: Singer Louise Tobin, Actress Betty Grable), she for the second; in Reno...
...hard work as well as the element of chance. He admires entertainers tremendously. "My mother liked theatrical people and they were always around the house -- not the big names, of course, but they had it in their blood. I remember in particular one family in Flatbush -- one was a showgirl. A showgirl considers herself much above a chorine, you know. There's a world of difference...