Comes Romance (Tom Taggart)
Last week I wrote about how Laughing Wildly reminded me of the kind of comedy that might pop up on a social media site. That insight may have been premature because Tom Taggart’s Comes Romance is a one-act play that reads like a half-hour sitcom pilot. Given that the play was first published in 1940 with the first American sitcom debuting in 1947, Taggart manages to preempt the chief American contribution to culture (if you don’t count jazz, musicals, or 24-hour news coverage.)
One of the most enduring aspects of Taggart’s otherwise mediocre writing is the depth he brings to his female characters, who often outnumber the male characters in his shows. This is sadly not true of Comes Romance. While Taggart has always been a product of the beliefs of his time at least his characters seemed like real people, but Comes Romance flattens everyone out to make the situation understandable and resolvable in the short space of the half-hour running time.
I feel the word misogynistic gets thrown around with a bit too much regularity, but if someone wanted to find a play that thoroughly showed the culture disrespecting women, Comes Romance is a tidy little volume with which to do that.
We find ourselves trapped in the living room of Albert and Patricia Shepherd. Albert rips the spirit of Jackie Gleason from the future as he fumes that it’s six o’clock and dinner is nowhere in sight! Patricia has spent the entire afternoon writing a marriage proposal for local beat cop Eddie and neglected all of her chores for the day. What follows is a mildly amusing action of Patricia inserting herself into the neighborhood’s romances, usually to the detriment of all involved, while the local lovers get confused and bereft and Albert fumes loudly.
If you want a play about victim blaming and the goodness of traditional gender roles Comes Romance is the work for you. Eventually the play has the rather unusual resolution of two women realizing they’ve been two-timed and so they settle for the galoots who have been pursuing them.
Although not nearly demonstrating the same levels of abuse a person staging Comes Romance would have similar obstacles as a production of Taming of the Shrew- the base assumptions the play makes about the audience simply are no longer true. A today audience is more likely to deride Albert for not making his own dinner instead of angrily insisting that Patricia should get back to it: although there is something to be said about Patricia not putting up her end of the partnership. A today audience probably cares much more that one of the women gets bruised from her would-be-boyfriend grabbing her to kiss her. There is a lot of anti-cop humor that probably plays the same though.
No, this is not a play for today’s audiences unless you wanted to make the entire production ironic, which for the sake of comedy, I do not.
