Time Magazine Article, July 6, 1981
"Game Loser"- 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 irrepresible humor on their lips. In sum, A Taste of Honey is a profile in
the beleagured 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 regurgative 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
wait, gets involved with a black sailor (Tom Wright) who ships out leaving her pregnant.
A good Samaritan homosexual (Keith Rddin) 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