The Theater: New Play on Broadway, Nov. 30, 1959

Only In America (by Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee) tells the story of Harry Golden, editor (The Carolina Israelite) and author of the bestselling Only in America. The stage difficulties involved are immediate and persistent. The adapters really have little to dramatize beyond a genially hard-hitting personality that best conveys itself in the first person, and a pungent egalitarian philosophy of life that seems blatantly pious when acted out. Adapters Lawrence and Lee must, in fact, swell out into two hours of theater what is not only ill suited to the theater, but what even in book form comes off best in ten-minute draughts.

They have brought Golden (Nehemiah Persoff) to Charlotte, N.C., introduced him around, and planted him in front of his typewriter. They festoon him with homely metaphors and Yiddish phrases and good, bad and indifferent jokes. They show him gradually, despite his embattled stand for integration, winning the hearts of all his white, Southern, Gentile neighbors. But in this game of hearts lurks a menacing queen of spades—the unsuspected fact that Golden had once served time in prison for mail fraud. It overhangs his life, until at last it breaks out in the headlines—only for all who know Harry Golden not just to rally round him but to render him homage.

That the adapters should so much magnify what everyone in the play is quick to minimize is proof of their desperate need for dramatic material; Golden's queen of spades is their one theatrical ace in the hole. Only in America has, certainly, its lively moments and amusing details, but it chiefly conveys a sense of stretching already flimsy materials—of building small incidents about Negroes or Jews into unctuous minority rites. Clearly the basic trouble with Only in America is that it should never have been a play. But the thought persists that only on Broadway, with its headlong opportunism, could it ever have become one.