Who'll Save the Plowboy?
Off-Broadway production, 1962
(by Frank D. Gilroy). The husband, Albert, guzzles false courage out of beer cans. The wife,
Helen, darns his socks and whines testily, "When was the last time you cut your toenails?"
She is not so much asking a question as emitting a fixed tone signal, an S 0 S of day in,
day out desperation. "Death or a new stove, I'll settle for either one," she says. The shabby
New York apartment is like a tank of formaldehyde preserving the couple's dead marriage,
dead hopes, and dead selves.
A visitor stirs the tank. Larry had been badly injured in World War II while saving Albert's
life in combat. At remeeting, they act out the awkward, bantering joviality of two men who
have only a 15-year-old memory in common. But Larry's questions become pressing, his
manner grave. Is Albert happy? Why didn't he buy the farm he used to dream of so longingly
that Larry nicknamed him "the plowboy"? Where is the child whom Albert named after Larry?
Between them, husband and wife desolate the visitor with unsparing revelations. The farm was
bought and bankrupted. The marriage is a sterile sham punctuated with joyless infidelities.
And when the play at length gives away its key secret, the monstrous lot of the child, Larry's
disillusionment is complete, for it turns out that he is dying of his old wounds and wanted to
assure himself that saving Albert was not for nothing. At play's end, all that remains is to face
despair with decency.
Despite O. Henry-like plot twists. Plowboy is a gritty and gripping play. Frank D. Gilroy sees
character with 20-20 vision and he can shape the grey, doughy speech of the inarticulate into
revealing patterns. Gerald O'Loughlin makes Albert a hollow but pitiable clown; the burntout,
empty eyes of Rebecca Darke's Helen are as lifeless as pits on the moon; William Smithers'
grey-faced Larry has the strength to bear the unbearable.
Who'll Save the Plowboy? is a slice-of-life play, but in its spare and honest intensity it slices close to the center.