Theater: Fresh Season, Moldy Play

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Mrs. Dally, by William Hanley. More Neanderthal men have crossed the American stage than ever lived in prehistoric caves. These slopeheads invariably gnaw their English, scratch their armpits, and lock jaws and claws with some naggingly neurotic female. A play dismally devoted to such characters opened the Broadway theater season amid the blanketing hush of the New York newspaper strike. Even without the so-called "death watch" of waiting for the daily drama critics' reviews, there was little proof that Mrs. Dally had ever been dramatically alive.

The heroine (Arlene Francis) is a middle-aged housewife— romantic despondent, full of vague aspirations', and a bit of a nit — who doesn't know whether to put her faith in Freud or Betty Fnedan. She is carrying on an illicit affair with an Italian-American sex mechanic (Robert Forster) who is young enough to be her son. She tries to inoculate the boy with culture by drooling John Donne to him, but he is a resolutely monosyllabic nobrow.

If Mrs. Dally's lover is a healthy clod, her taxi-driver husband (Ralph Meeker) is a wounded, raging animal who empties bottles and smashes chairs— because it one accepts Playwright Hanley's shaky psychologizing, he let his three-year-old son drown years before. Mrs. Dally tries to put a think-tank in this poor tiger but he is properly mystified by a wifely oracle who is as daft as she is Delphic: "I think a lot of people could be great people."

Ralph Meeker bestows a mangled dignity on a simple man's right not to think But TV's ubiquitous Arlene Francis What's My Line?) is a 21 -inch actress on a 30-foot stage. Husband or lover, or playgoer, they are all panel guests to her.