L.A.’s ‘Checkmates’ Faces Critical Variety in Debut on Broadway

Los Angeles audiences had a good time at Ron Milner’s “Checkmates” last season, first at the Inner City Cultural Center, then at the Westwood Playhouse. Ah, but was Milner’s comedy good enough for Broadway?

It arrived there Thursday night, at the 46th St. Theater. The New York Times’ Frank Rich thought that it wasn’t good enough. “While it’s easy to name a recent Broadway play or two as awful as ‘Checkmates,’ ” he wrote, “it may be necessary to get out the scrapbooks to recall one quite so amateurish and boring.”

Clive Barnes of the New York Post was amused by Milner’s notion of contrasting a square black couple who had been married forever (Paul Winfield and Ruby Dee), with a hip young couple who still didn’t feel married (Denzel Washington and Marsha Jackson).

If the whole thing was sort of slapdash, Barnes still thought that it “got the Broadway season off to a running start.”

The TV critics found “Checkmates” a funny show, with WABC’s Joel Siegel suggesting that there were insights under the laughter.

The other print critics thought the play “mediocre” (Howard Kissell, Daily News) and “a crudely constructed sitcom” (Michael Kuchwara, Associated Press), but praised the acting--particularly Winfield, who had done the play in Los Angeles, and Dee, who hadn’t. (Woodie King Jr. was again the director.)

Point of information: Rich wondered why the play was called “Checkmates.” Because the younger couple shared a checkbook.

O’NEILL FLOPS ON B’WAY. Variety reports that the O’Neill repertory--”Ah, Wilderness” and “Long Day’s Journey Into Night”--closed after only 47 performances on Broadway, marking “the fifth consecutive commercial failure of an O’Neill production.” On whom is this a judgment?

WILD GEESE CHASE. An Irish-American philanthropic organization called the Wild Geese has put up a $25,000 prize for the best new play on the Irish-American experience--the winner to be announced next St. Patrick’s Day. Send scripts to the Abbey Theatre, Lower Abbey St., Dublin 1, Ireland. (The winning script will get dual productions at the Abbey and the Milwaukee Repertory Theatre.) Deadline: Dec. 15.

IN QUOTES. Actor-director Simon Callow in Theatre Week: “It is the ability to enter into the thought processes of a character that makes a great actor, not the emotions.”