[In the following excerpt, Kauffmann provides a somewhat unfavorable assessment of Lemon Sky, contending that it “accomplishes little.”]

Three new off-Broadway productions [Colette, by Ellen Stewart; Lemon Sky, by Lanford Wilson; and The Me Nobody Knows, by Orpheum] underline a familiar truth: American performing is better than American writing. …

Christopher Walken [in Lemon Sky,] is a talented young actor at the other end of the spectrum from Miss Caldwell [cast as the title character in Colette] He doesn't have her technical virtuosity, and he has ambitions only towards realistic acting, even in the Shakespeare of his that I've seen. But, besides stage ease and easy charm, he has an unusual conviction of quintessence. In Lemon Sky he plays a late teenager (as well as the boy's older self), and we know at once that the core of that boy has come on stage in Walken.

Walken has an extrinsic nuisance in his life, a physical resemblance to Jon Voight, of Midnight Cowboy, another gifted actor. One distinction between them, however, is that Walken has a greater feminine quality (not to be confused with effeminacy), which I find attractive in men. And he has the strength for encompassment. There are moments in this play when everything whirls about him and, after a moment's circumspection, he seems to gather up everything that's whirling and advance with it. I hope his voice keeps developing and that every time his vowels flatten out, he means them to. With his growth, his career can grow.

Charles Durning, an actor who has only seemed passable to me previously, is here perfectly cast as Walken's father—a beer-drinking vulgar supermale—and finds a range of humanity in the part. Bonnie Bartlett, as Walken's stepmother, supplies plain-faced, California-bungalow, suffering submission and also some credible touches of the universality that sometimes glints in the tract house. Warren Enters has directed adequately, with no suspicion of originality.

Lemon Sky, by the young playwright Lanford Wilson, is about a youth from the Midwest who leaves his divorced mother to live with his father and second wife in California, and why it doesn't work out. The dialogue is fluent vernacular, brightened by occasional inversions of cliché. (“I won't tell you my dreams if you won't tell me yours.”) There are occasional perceptions—not of character but of the natural world—that verge on the poetic. But the play disappoints. It begins with an air of great portent and uses a lot of arty structural apparatus but accomplishes little. All that happens finally is that the father accuses the son—falsely, it seems—of homosexuality, and the boy leaves. A very great deal of back-and-forth time-flow, choric comment, and comment on the play itself is expended on slight dramatic material and shallow characters. And Wilson uses, yet again, the device of telling us that a character we see is going to die soon, thus trying to win for her a degree of pathos that she hasn't earned.

Wilson's play, The Gingham Dog, presented on Broadway last year, failed through its desperate symmetries and hollow encyclopedism, but it had a trenchant portrait of a young black wife in a black-white marriage. A lot of Wilson's work seems to be based on his (white) boyhood and youth and tends to be Thornton Wilder réchauffé, if somewhat leaner. But it is that black girl whom I remember and who makes me care about Wilson's future.