Ivanhoe Theatre
Chicago, Illinois
October, 1973

Chita recalls the Chicago production of Father's Day as an exquisite experience in the theater. She played "Louise," a character created on Broadway by Brenda Vaccaro.
The story concerns three father's paying visits to their ex-wives, all neighbors in a fashionable New York apartment building on Father's Day. The original production
opened and closed in one night, but after the success of the Chicago outing, the play
was revived more successfully in 1979.

T.E. Kalem of Time magazine described the play as follows:

Divorce is major surgery. Even if the operation is a seeming success, the patient is never quite the same. The prevalence of divorce has had an incalculable effect on the fabric of U.S. society, but our playwrights rarely broach the subject. A notable exception is Oliver Hailey. His Father's Day examines the scar tissue of pain; yet his play is saturated with wry, bitchy, gallant and sex-laced humor, the kind of hilarity that rises from the ashes of despair.

Eight years ago, this play opened and closed in one night on Broadway. Fate is likely to prove kinder this time, since the production is housed in the intimate surroundings of Manhattan's American Place Theater. Father's Day is nothing if not intimate. Initially, it may have been ahead of its time. Playgoers are probably more receptive now to hearing women talk openly of sexual desires and needs.

The three women in Father's Day have been left by their husbands. Their responses define their temperaments and personalities. Louise is brash, her language is raw, and she is a comic spitfire. She is still in a towering rage over the divorce and harbors delusions of winning her husband back from his present wife.

Marian is ultracivilized, a paragon of taste and class. She holds no lasting grudge over the divorce and even goes to bed with her ex from time to time. Estelle, the most recently separated, is bewildered and scarcely able to cope with the enormity of the experience. An orphan who married an orphan, she had a glowing faith that building a nest would be the golden tie that binds forever.

In Act II we meet the men who still occupy the holes in the women's hearts.

They are not so sharply etched as the women, but are reasonably engaging.

Marian's man is a promiscuous boulevardier who swings both ways. Louise's former husband is a likable fellow, pugilistic only during the marital mismatch. Estelle's man lives in an orphanage of the mind except that he now has a Du Pont to bail him out.

Too many glib one-liners sail across the stage, but mainly the drama cuts through the seas of postmatrimonial distress, casting a spray of laughter over the salty follies of sex.

T.E. Kalem