Theater: The Second Mrs. Goforth

The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore, partially rewritten by Tennessee Williams, stopped on Broadway for the second time within a year in a rare and tenacious attempt to better a badly received, short-run play. But it is not better. The new version is weaker, more discursive and less dramatic. After five performances it closed.

The play is still a religious allegory centered on "the need to find someone or something that means God to you." But the character of Flora Goforth, the rich, raffish ex-Follies girl dying in her Italian mountaintop villa, has lost fire. When Hermione Baddeley played Flora, the dark power of death was as chilling as her nighttime screams. The second Mrs. Goforth, Tallulah Bankhead, seems to regard death as part of the servant problem, a petty retainer whom she can sack with a throaty rumble of brandy-voiced regality. Perhaps actressing is a better word for her performance than acting.

Christopher Flanders, "Angel of Death" and freeloading mystic, sheds no greater spiritual light than he did the first time. Chris represents goodness conceived of negatively as the absence of evil. As Tab Hunter plays him, he is the saint as camp counselor, an earnest, bearded, good-deed-a-day man, but scarcely a religious knight shielding the weak from the fierce dominion of death.

In Milk Train, Tennessee Williams is concerned with ultimate things—the meaning of life, death and God—and the play has the bedrock interest that man's fate always holds for man. These fundamental questions demand answers, and Williams has only been able to give them echoes.