The Hallams

Fifteen years ago Rose Franken wrote Another Language, and there was born one of the few enduring plays of the American Theatre. Miss Franken wrote with an Attic salt, a sense of the comedy of life, and an acid that bit deeply into human understanding. A decade and a half later Miss Franken again focuses her dramatic interest upon the family of Another Language, and brings to us The Hallams. The world has moved swiftly in these intervening years, but the Hallams have remained untouched and unchanged, their ways, their concepts, the things they live by, unaltered. However, the seeds of growth are within them, and are at work, and the dominion of the matriarch is tainted with dissolution. This is a play sol finely drawn, so subtly conceived, that the myriad threads of the lives of these eleven people as they impinge and affect one another, is orchestrated into a compelling drama, an integrated and symphonic experience in the theatre. Never guilty of tawdry device nor manipulation of plot or incident, Miss Franken weaves a story of universal implication and identifiability.