MRS. DALLY HAS A LOVER. New York Newsday says: “It has something of the quality of a Dorothy Parker sketch with its keen observations and deft portrait of a woman in love, knowing that this love cannot last. Mrs. Dally is well into her thirties, married to a man she despises and carrying on an affair with the teenaged son of a family living in the same tenement building. Despite its theme and its 'kitchen sink’ locale, there is nothing sordid about Mr. Hanley’s play. It has humor and an equal share of pathos. The boy is affectionate but inarticulate; the woman has larger dimensions in her efforts to sow romance and harvest beauty in barren soil. Her simple recital of the death of her only child, her reading of one of Donne’s love poems, her performance on a trombone which she once played professionally, mix drama and comedy with skill and sensitivity. To me there was no false note in the touching one-acter.”

TODAY IS INDEPENDENCE DAY : It is the morning of a sultry July 4th. Evalyn, rouses her husband, Sam. Sam’s arm is in a cast, having been broken fighting off an attempt to hijack his taxi. But Sam doesn’t want to talk about this for he is unsure of his wife’s motives. Their ensuing conversation is filled with barbs and subtle rebukes. But it is evident that Evalyn has reached a point of critical re-evaluation, and, amidst their attempts to hurt each other, she tells Sam that she loves him. He reacts as though too much had already been done to destroy the very thing which Evalyn is trying to hold on to. The conversation turns to other matters, but it is soon brought up short by Evalyn’s admission that she is undergoing psychiatric treatment. The confession is a measure of her desperate unhappiness and the thing which makes Sam resolve to leave her. But as he is preparing to go a messenger arrives with flowers for Evalyn’s birthday—which Sam had not forgotten despite all. Somehow this small act of concern brings a sense of release to both of them, as though their crisis, while not resolved, had been ameliorated by a new awareness that what they have together is all there will be for both of them and they must make the best of it.

First public performance: The Cherry Lane Theatre, on October 1, 1962, New York.

Director: Richard Altman.