Arts & Manners: A Lousy Evening with Mencken

The National Park Service asked for deletions in the script of An Unpleasant Evening with H. L. Mencken which just finished a run at Ford’s Theater in Washington. They didn’t get most of them—but it can’t have made any difference. David Wayne, the principal (the unique), as Mencken, proved more deleterious than a censor’s scissors in the hands of Lester Maddox: He simply forgot most of his lines.

Paul Shyre, who adapted Mencken’s fulminations and directed the production, said he would “close the show before I’d tamper with the script.” One wishes he had done either—for the offering turns out to be an execrable evening with David Wayne poorly and without characterization quoting assorted epithets from Baltimore’s foremost troll.

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Brad Evans

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The National Park Service asked for deletions in the script of An Unpleasant Evening with H. L. Mencken which just finished a run at Ford’s Theater in Washington. They didn’t get most of them—but it can’t have made any difference. David Wayne, the principal (the unique), as Mencken, proved more deleterious than a censor’s scissors in the hands of Lester Maddox: He simply forgot most of his lines.

Paul Shyre, who adapted Mencken’s fulminations and directed the production, said he would “close the show before I’d tamper with the script.” One wishes he had done either—for the offering turns out to be an execrable evening with David Wayne poorly and without characterization quoting assorted epithets from Baltimore’s foremost troll.