A Thousand Clowns | Review of A Thousand Clowns
In the following review of the initial staging of A Thousand Clowns, Clurman recognizes Gardner’s talent but asserts that the play is overlong and that its ‘‘anti-conformity is but a reflex of conformity.’’
Herb Gardner who wrote A Thousand Clowns, his first play (Eugene O’Neill Theatre), has talent. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that he is adept. He is astute and can write funny lines. One of the ads has it that the play provides ‘‘a thousand laughs.’’ Half as many would have been more than enough.
The play might be described as a comic paean to nonconformity. Our audiences, being trapped in the contraptions of our civilization, seek escape: they find it in such plays as A Thousand Clowns. It reminds one of Kaufman and Hart’s You Can’t Take It...
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