Battle ax disdained

in quest for equality

By Peter Bellamy "It's just as bad for a girl to say 'damn' as it is for a man to go out and get drunk.'

This absurd quote from the president of the Ohio Mothers Club in 1915 is in the lobby of the Center Repertory Theater and gives a clue to the mood of "Women and Other People.**

This play with music is a reflective and at times touching treatise on women. Its message is that while females are biologically different from males they should be treated as equals in all other ways.

No reasonable person can disagree with this conclusion.

The play will irritate only the more bellicose women's libbers, because it isn't militant enough, and Iran's Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.

Julie Adams, of TV and films, and Ellen Geer, an actress, who together compiled the show's text, clearly think they can do more for the cause of women with humor and eloquence than with the battle

ax.

The entertainment-polemic's songs and lyrics are from the works of Ira Gershwin, Arthur Schwartz, Kurt Weill, Ogden Nash, John Kander, Dory Previn, Fred Ebb, Richard Rodgers, Lorenz Hart and Stephen Sondheim.

The prose has been taken from Colette, the French novelist, Charlote Bronte, St. Paul, Aristotle, Ms. Geer, Susan Griffin, Dorothy Parker and Mrs. Betty Williams, who is founder of the People's Peace Movement.

The songs and dialog touch upon girlhood, marriage, motherhood, divorce, lesbianism and prostitution. Although they never appear, one sees the men in the women's lives in the mind's eyes.

As sung, danced and spoken by Miss Adams and Marilynn Lovell, actress and nightclub performer, the intimate show suggests a visit

"

RJ

In Review

with two highly intelligent ladies with a just cause.

Jerry Frankel is not only a skilled pianist, he is a splendid accompanist, which is hard to find. The simple choreography by Marge Champion gives the action graceful movement.

One of the most touching moments comes when Ms. Lovell in the role of a mother reads aloud a letter from a daughter in which the daughter confesses she's a lesbian who has just moved in with another lesbian with a child.

One may only imagine with what anguish of soul a parent reared to believe that such relationships are barren, against the laws of God and man and socially disastrous would respond to such a situation.

To show there are some women with veonom-covered claws, Ms. Adams does an acidly funny sketch in which one woman verbally shreds another to bits.

There's an interesting quote from Belvah Lockwood, who in 1884 became the first woman to run for president of the United States. Mrs. Lockwood said women have had to set their own precedents since Eve in the Garden of Eden.

"Women and Other People" indicates that women have come along way and are going to go farther and that men aren't all bad, but could be much much better.