Theater: Gabfest

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I Was Dancing. Novelist Edwin O'Connor has always created characters with a tongue or two in their heads. In his first play, his hero is a retired vaudevillian, Waltzing Daniel Considine. Burgess Meredith acts, sings, and dances the part as if gazing nostalgically into the splintered mirror of a show-biz Narcissus grown old.

Through Waltzing Dan's room troop: his termagant sister (Pert Kelton), a scold who would rather be righteous than right; a mournful Jewish crony, much dismayed that a recently deceased and cremated friend might be occupying the ashtray at his elbow; a refreshingly downbeat priest to whom God is all Greek and man is vile, and a medical fraud who takes Polaroid pictures of his patients at each visit to trace their rate of decay. These flavorful characters are impaled on a toothpick plot like canapes. The story that should make the play go makes it stop —whether Waltzing Dan can cozen a long-ignored son (Orson Bean) into giving him houseroom to die in.

O'Connor has a fine ear but perhaps too much patience with the talk that reveals character. If conversation were drama, theater would be superfluous.