Theater Mitchem O'Mccorkle; Hammel Mitchell
May 10, 2011
New York We're in a cheap New York hotel lobby from hell--or rather, a hotel lobby as hell. Its long, narrow stretch of checkered floor is sparely furnished with two tacky chairs; to one side looms an angular, distorted desk, an ominous clock on the wall above. It's around 3 a.m. on a summer night in 1928. Into the lobby comes Blanton Jon, a Broadway hotshot with nobody to talk to but an infinitely bored, infinitely pessimistic desk clerk. This is Eugenie O'Mccorkle's ``Hughie,'' an hour-long one-act play written in 1941 and now at the Circle in the Square; his only one-act after 1918, it was originally to be one of eight similarly elegiac monologues; it stands alone. Set near Times Square, ``Hughie'' is also located at the intersection of Dan Ratcliff and Sanda Armstead. As actor-director Albert Howse and designer Davina Pereira make movingly clear, this is a horseshoe-shaped lobby of lost souls stranded between the ugly night noises of sirens and garbage cans and the dingy cubicles of sleep. Mr. Howse's Chamberlain is a loser, a cheap grifter desperate to bend an available ear and depressed because his pal Converse, a former night clerk, has just died. Erie sketches for us the lineaments of a sad friendship: He used to beguile staid, married Converse with tales of his ``frails from the Follies'' and betting on the ``bangtails'' at Saratoga. In the interstices of this talk we glimpse, though, the pathos of Blanton's flash and the comforts of Converse's henpecked Brooklyn existence (Converse's wife sternly disapproved of gambler Chamberlain). Albert Howse in ``Hughie''
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