Broadway: Gilroy Is Here

For too long, it was more than a little disturbing that Edward Albee was the only new, young, serious dramatic voice on Broadway. But now another one, considerably lower and more firmly pitched, is being heard. The play is called The Subject Was Roses. And the playwright, Frank D. Gilroy, has developed his skills so thoroughly that his presence seems obviously durable.

He is a writer of remarkable finesse, for in outline his play is plotless and drab. The only son of a Bronx couple comes home from World War II, and with eyes of new maturity recognizes that although his parents love him, he has no home at all, since their marriage has long been an unsuitable alternative to death. But Gilroy's plain, familial triangle rings with insight and trenchancy. His people live. His ear is as good as Harold Pinter's and, like Pinter, he can put two or three people in a room, start them talking and sustain long successions of commonplaces that never subside in their fascination. Pulling all this burlap to threads, he reweaves it into a fabric that is still coarse but made to last.

Concrete Characters. Sharply handsome, touched with grey at the temples, neatly dressed, educated in the Ivy League and trained in television, Gilroy must trouble the sight of all the pale poets who feel that wine, whiskers and Paris are the only stimulants of art. He works in a little $30-a-month office on the main street of Goshen, near his home in Orange County, N.Y., where he lives with his wife and three sons.

He looks out his office window over a Civil War statue and creates dramatic characters that are no less concrete but nonetheless alive. Some people tell him that his meticulous realism is about that far behind the progress of modern playwriting.

"I haven't set out to reverse any trends," he answers. "The stories I have told so far tell best in a realistic way. I have nothing against the avantgarde. I feel little tendencies in myself bubbling in that direction. I thought I had darned well better be able to present living persons on the stage before I tried to distill and abstract them."

His new play, he says, "is frankly autobiographical." The father (played by Jack Albertson, a vaudeville comic who had never before done a serious dramatic role and whose stunningly right performance is worth a visit in itself) is a coffee importer. Gilroy's father, now dead, was a coffee importer and one of the best tasters in the busi ness. As a youngster, Gilroy used to go down to Front Street and watch his father tasting coffee, noting how all the phonies present would form their own opinions from his father's grunts and grimaces.