Burning Bright (Broadway Theatre Archive) (1959) Review

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(More customer reviews)The Broadway Theatre Archives series is full of gems. You will find treasures hidden in this collection, especially memorable performances by many actors and actresses who never made it big in the movies, like Kim Stanley, Julie Harris, Blythe Danner, Joan Hackett. Or some legendary performances from the stage, which were luckily preserved in these TV adaptations, like Jason Robards in "The Iceman Cometh" and Lee J. Cobb in "Death of a Salesman".
Unfortunately, this adaptation of the John Steinbeck play is not one of those treasures.
The story plays like a male "Yerma" (the Garcia Lorca play in which a woman is devastated for her inability to have a child). You might be laughing already and that's the problem. Such a subject needs a very careful treatment for it to be compelling in any time and place. A desolate old guy who could never have children laments that he will die without passing on his bloodline. The concept borders on the ludicrous, but it's intriguing nonetheles.
Unfortunately, this is more ludicrous than intriguing, greatly helped by the pathetically melodramatic performance of Myron McCormick, the lead. You can not help but feeling turned off by his constant wailings and it makes it very difficult to understand what is it that his wife (Colleen Dewhurst) sees in him.
The fact that the four acts of the play take place in different settings to show us the universality of the dilemma only makes thingw worse. At the beginning we have the characters in a circus setting, on the second act in a farm, and then it all ends up in a ship, with everybody changing costumes. By the end, we have been bulldozed by the fake "universality" of this atrocious take on the tragedy of male sterility.
As for the intriguing, that's left to the great Collen Dewhurst, as the sterile man's wife, who will go to any lengths to give him a child that he believes is his. Her character reaches malignant dimensions in her quest and her performance gives hints of this, unfortunately the story is more interested in the syrupy side.
A curiosity, but not really worth it. If you want to see great theather on TV, better go check one of the rare (and spectacular) performances of Kim Stanley in "Dragon Country" or Blythe Danner in "The Eccentricities of a Nightingale"

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