Nowadays, film and theater companies spend a lot of
money on something called marketing to figure out why audiences like or hate
certain productions. It was far less scientific in the mid-century heyday of Jean Kerr and her husband Walter—who, when he wasn’t trying to write plays of
his own, was turning his hand far more successfully to theater criticism.
Jean had her share of opportunities to try to gauge
audience reactions, having written several plays herself. One was, as these
things go, a triumph—Mary, Mary, which ran for 1,500 performances and
was turned into a movie. Other comedies were not so successful: Jenny Kissed
Me, Poor Richard, Finishing Touches, and Lunch Hour.
And then there was Goldilocks.
I’ve decided that by the end of the year, I really, really
must blog about this musical collaboration between Jean and Walter—an experience
so hideous that the couple agreed never to mention its name again.
Whatever. Jean Kerr never let disaster stop her—it just
became fodder for a future play, or, more often, a humor column, brought together
in four collections during her lifetime.
Most famously, she wrote Please Don’t Eat the Daisies,
a look at midcentury life in the suburbs minus the angst of John Cheever or Mad
Men. As Elizabeth Austin wrote in Washington Monthly after Kerr’s
death in 2003, the playwright-humorist “created a persona that was competent,
funny, self-assured, calm in the face of domestic emergency, unapologetically
competitive on the tennis court, and tremendously gifted when it came to
keeping a houseful of youngsters happily occupied on a rainy afternoon.”
I would say you get something of a sense of this warmth
and vivacity in today’s quote, as well as in the image accompanying this post.
