Bernard Slade

• Born: May 2, 1930
• Birthplace: St. Catharines, Ontario, Canada
• Died: October 30, 2019
• Place of death: Beverly Hills, California

Other Literary Forms

Before his first (and highly successful) efforts on Broadway with Same Time, Next Year, Bernard Slade spent seventeen years as a writer for television, first as a playwright and later as a series creator and writer. Slade’s work in television drama began in the days of live broadcasts in the 1950’s and 1960’s, including a number of hourlong plays first produced by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation between 1957 and 1963. Several of these plays were also produced on American television for the U.S. Steel Hour series. Between 1964 and 1974, Slade wrote a number of pilot films for American television that eventually became successful television series. His major achievements in this genre included Love on a Rooftop, The Flying Nun, The Partridge Family, Bridget Loves Bernie, The Girl with Something Extra, The Bobby Sherman Show, and Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, all comedies. Slade’s television credits also included authorship of approximately one hundred episodes for these and other series, including Bewitched and My Living Doll. Slade said of his experiences as a writer for television that “the controls built into network television, which is basically an advertising medium, don’t exactly encourage creativity. Still, TV was my choice. It gave me the financial freedom to sit down and write a play.” In 1974, Slade left television to devote full time to writing plays for the theater.

The successful Broadway run of Same Time, Next Year made possible Slade’s continued work in still another entertainment medium: major motion pictures. Slade wrote screenplays for Stand Up and Be Counted (1971), Same Time, Next Year (1978), Tribute (1980), and Romantic Comedy (1983).

Achievements

Throughout Bernard Slade’s career, his major works attracted the prompt and generally enthusiastic attention of the major New York newspapers, including The New York Times, the New York Post, and the New York Daily News. Magazines such as Time and Newsweek also carried half-page articles on Slade’s works, and scenes from his plays appeared alongside reviews of all three major television networks. In 1975, Same Time, Next Year, long on the list of the top ten longest-running shows, received nominations from all the major awards institutions. The stage version received a Tony nomination, the American Academy of Humor Award, and the prestigious Drama Desk Award, and the screen version received the Academy Award and Writers Guild nominations for Best Screenplay.

Slade’s works also resulted in awards and nominations for actress Ellen Burstyn and actor Jack Lemmon. Burstyn received the Tony Award for Best Actress in 1975 for her portrayal of Doris in Same Time, Next Year, and Lemmon earned Tony and Academy Award nominations for his stage and film work as Scottie Templeton in Tribute.

Slade was recognized as a major talent both on Broadway and in Hollywood, and his international following increased with each new production. All his major plays did well in foreign countries, especially England and France, and Same Time, Next Year was produced in some thirty-five countries around the world. Foreign productions of Slade’s plays have traditionally retained the plays’ American settings. Slade himself was the first to break with tradition when he Anglicized Special Occasions for his directorial debut in London in 1983.

Biography

Bernard Slade Newbound was born in St. Catharines, Ontario, Canada, on May 2, 1930. His parents, Fred and Bessie (née Walbourne) Newbound, were originally from England. When he was four, Slade moved to England with his family and settled in London near the Croydon airport, where his father worked as a mechanic. With the threat of war, Slade, like many children, was evacuated from London, spending the year 1939 in a foster home. Shortly after his return to London at the age of ten, the Battle of Britain broke out in full force: The first daylight bombing of London destroyed the Croydon airport, four blocks from Slade’s home, and Slade’s father was one of the few workers there to survive the attack.

Life in England took on a restless quality during the war years. The family moved often, and Slade attended some thirteen schools around the country between the late 1930’s and 1948. Despite the war, Slade found time to attend the theater and to act in several amateur productions, among them Noël Coward’s I’ll Leave It to You (pr. 1919). In 1948, the family left England to return to Canada, Slade taking with him his love for the theater and a few pages of notes for plays of his own.

In Canada, Slade worked briefly at a customs office but soon quit his job to resume acting, first in summer stock and later for year-round theaters, where he often did a different play each week. He acted in more than three hundred plays in all, including virtually every romantic comedy written in the 1930’s and 1940’s. Although Slade disliked the indignity of looking for work as an actor, the experience of being in front of an audience every night eventually paid off as he absorbed a sense of how and when a play works.

In 1957, after nine years of acting in winter and summer stock theater, Slade sat down during a break in the play in which he was performing and wrote a television play designed to provide himself with a good part. Both the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and, in the United States, the National Broadcasting Company bought the play but found different actors to take Slade’s part. The Prizewinner, Slade’s first television play, was very much in the tradition of live broadcast drama popularized by the U.S. Steel Hour and the Goodyear TV Playhouse in New York, particularly the work of such writers as Paddy Chayefsky and Tad Mosel. Slade went on to write many more teleplays, a number of which were produced in the United States as well as in Canada in the late 1950’s and early 1960’s.

In 1963, having realized that Hollywood was quickly establishing itself as the center for North American television production, Slade moved to California with his wife, Jill Foster Hancock, and their two children and began writing scripts for a new television series entitled Bewitched. Soon afterward, he signed a contract (later to become a succession of three-year contracts) with Screen Gems to write pilot films, rarely staying with a show once it became a series. In all, Slade wrote seven pilots, each of which became a successful series, and more than one hundred episode scripts. In 1974, Slade, financially secure, left television and turned his sights on the theater.

Begun on an airplane en route to Hawaii, Same Time, Next Year surpassed all Slade’s expectations at its opening at Boston’s Colonial Theatre in February, 1975. The play quickly moved to New York’s Brooks Atkinson Theatre, where it opened on March 13 to standing room only and the unanimous acclamation of New York’s best-known theater critics. Soon afterward, Slade wrote the screenplay, and in 1978, Universal Studios released Same Time, Next Year, starring Alan Alda and Ellen Burstyn. Earlier, in 1977, Slade had returned to the stage with his wife to star in a Canadian production of Same Time, Next Year.

Same Time, Next Year was followed by Tribute and, one year later, Romantic Comedy, the former originally designed for and offered to Jack Lemmon, who opened the play at Boston’s Colonial Theatre on April 6, and in New York on June 1, 1978. Reviews focused primarily on Lemmon’s outstanding performance as Scottie Templeton, and criticism of the play was for the most part favorable. Slade then wrote the screenplay for Tribute, and, in December, 1980, Twentieth Century-Fox released the film version, starring, once again, Lemmon. Like its predecessors, Romantic Comedy opened in Boston and moved to New York, where it played for a year and earned high praise from the critics (Clive Barnes called it Slade’s best play) before being adapted for the screen. More than any of Slade’s other plays, Romantic Comedy reflects the enormous influence of the romantic comedies of the 1930’s and 1940’s on its author.

By all critical accounts, Special Occasions was Slade’s first failure: The play closed after only one night at the Music Box in New York. Critics pointed their collective finger at the staging primarily and at the story secondarily and found little to like about either. In 1983, Slade took a slightly different version of Special Occasions to England, where the play was received with more sympathy by critics and public alike. Slade thus continues to be a major figure in world theater, although the economic rigors of Broadway have prevented his later works from enjoying the same box-office success as his early plays. The 1987 broadcast of his television play Moving Day marked his return to the genre in which he enjoyed his first success. The same year, he released the play Sweet William, which was later titled An Act of Imagination.

When asked by Who’s Who in America to describe his work and career, Slade responded, “I am a prisoner of a childhood dream: to write for the theatre. The fulfillment of that dream has lived up to all my expectations. I believe the theatre should be a celebration of the human condition and that the artist’s job is to remind us of all that is good about ourselves. I feel privileged to be given a platform for my particular vision of life, and, whether my plays succeed or fail, I am always grateful for the use of the hall.” Slade died at the age of eighty-nine on October 30, 2019, due to complications of Lewy body dementia.

Analysis

One might best approach Bernard Slade’s major works—Same Time, Next Year, Tribute, Romantic Comedy, and Special Occasions—by first surveying their common ground. All Slade’s plays are comedies for the most part, although Tribute and Special Occasions contain more frequent departures into the pathetic than do Same Time, Next Year and Romantic Comedy. (Tribute is, at its simplest level, a story about a man who knows when and how he is going to die, while the “special occasions” in the play of that title include divorce, disfiguring automobile accidents, and alcoholic blackouts.) The time frame of a typical Slade play is usually quite broad: Special Occasions covers one night of Amy and Michael Ruskin’s marriage and ten years of their divorce; Romantic Comedy spans thirteen years of an on-again, off-again professional writing relationship; and Same Time, Next Year begins in 1951 and ends in 1975, with every indication that its adulterous affair will continue into a fourth decade.

Time is always significant in Slade’s works. All four major productions plot the maturation of one or two principal characters over a period of years or months. Quite often the chief protagonist is a male, between thirty and fifty years of age, who makes his living as a writer of one sort or another (Michael Ruskin in Special Occasions and Jason Carmichael in Romantic Comedy are playwrights). The liberal time frame allows for a wide variety of situations that culminate in self-recognition on the part of the protagonists and a happy ending for the audience. Slade’s characters typically experience an illicit affair (not always at center stage), a divorce, a career crisis, and problems with their children and their own maturation. The crowd onstage is always sparse. Two plays—Special Occasions and Same Time, Next Year—have only two characters each; Romantic Comedy and Tribute have six and seven characters, respectively. Children rarely appear onstage (Tribute is again the exception), yet despite their absence they are often crucial to the plot. Amy and Michael Ruskin’s children in Special Occasions never appear in the spotlight, but all three younger Ruskins have highly individual personalities, and all are so carefully drawn that the audience is convinced of their existence even in their absence. Stephen is at a stage that everyone is hoping he will grow out of, Jennifer is a musical genius (her piano playing is audible), and Kelly is dull. One might assess other characters’ personalities with similar ease, even though they are never seen. Indeed, whole scenes in Same Time, Next Year are devoted to the unsuspecting husband and the more astute wife (both absent) of the lovers, and most of Special Occasions concerns people who are not formally in the play. Thus, just as the extended time frame convinces the audience members that they are not simply spectators at a play but observers of continuous human history, so do Slade’s offstage personalities convince them that the principal characters are real people with lives beyond the spotlights.

If there is an all-encompassing thesis that one might extract from Slade’s major productions, it is this: Life does not distill itself into isolated instances of time but is instead an evolving process that touches other people who may or may not be present in the flesh but whose influence is felt from moment to moment. The isolated moment can say much (as is the case in Special Occasions), but every moment has its context in things outside. While Slade’s focus is always on center stage, one senses from the very beginning the presence of a background—historical and densely populated—that gradually comes to life and establishes itself as the source of what one sees and hears onstage. Like his earlier plays for television, Slade’s Broadway productions offer little slices of life, complete with triumphs and tragedies, while the whole from which the slice is taken remains conspicuously and deliberately close at hand. Finally, though they sometimes place a strain on credulity, the triumphs win out over the tragedies with remarkable consistency. When Slade’s world becomes dark—and it does so almost rhythmically—the darkness lasts only for its appointed duration. There is always a character ready with a joke, however nervously he may tell it, or a stagehand ready with a curtain, to bring one back to the realization that everything will be all right—in time.

Same Time, Next Year

In no other play does Slade use time more conspicuously than in Same Time, Next Year, his most successful Broadway production. The plot is simple enough: George and Doris leave their spouses at home with the children and meet at the same country inn near San Francisco for one weekend every year from 1951 to 1975. They make love 113 times (George, an accountant, uses his calculator to arrive at the figure), taking a brief but unexpected respite in 1961 because of Doris’s pregnancy (and early labor) and George’s impotence. (The timing is not always so perfect: In 1965, Doris refuses to have sex with him because he voted for Barry Goldwater.) Yet despite the play’s dependence on the affair for its plot, Same Time, Next Year is only superficially about adultery. Its real focus is on growing up and on the 364 or so days a year that make George and Doris appear different each time the audience sees them.

The play opens on the morning following the pair’s initial encounter. There are awkward moments at first, and George has grave misgivings about the whole situation. He tells lies, he calls Doris by a wrong name, and he is sure that his wife knows all about his infidelity. Doris, despite her Roman Catholic upbringing, is much more relaxed. She even eats George’s breakfast for him. George’s appetite, when it returns, is for sex: “The Russians have the bomb!” he exclaims, using world events and the threat of annihilation to justify sexual license. Having become familiar with each other sexually, the two decide to tell stories about the good and the bad sides of their spouses as a means of getting to know each other better. George already has his stories prepared, so he begins what later will become part of the ritual celebrated every February in the small country inn that never changes.

Despite the static quality of the setting and the fact that each of the five-year intervals follows closely the formula established in the first encounter, Same Time, Next Year is a story about the profound change in the lives of the principal characters and in the larger world outside. The year 1961, for example, matches George’s impotence against Doris’s pregnancy (both conditions say a good deal about what 1960 must have been like for them). In 1965, Doris is liberated both in her dress and in her philosophical and sociological outlook, while George is on Librium, and by 1970, Doris has bought into the new “chic” establishment and opened an exclusive and highly successful French catering business, while George has exchanged his conservative lifestyle for denim and sandals. His conversation summarizes up the age of analysis with accuracy and charm: “When you first walked into the room I picked up your high tension level. Then after we made love I sensed a certain anxiety reduction but now I’m getting a definite negative feedback.”

The source of the high tension level lies in the people and events in the world and outside the inn. George’s impotence is only aggravated by his mother calling long distance to discuss possible cures, and his flirtation with Librium dependency is a direct result of his son’s death in Vietnam. Although his psychoananalytic jargon is amusing, there are, nevertheless, serious reasons behind his decision to seek psychiatric help. The decision comes not a moment too soon, for, in 1975, George, now a widower, tells his last story about his wife with a degree of equanimity that comes only after years of dealing with life-altering experiences. The years have been kinder to Doris, whose only crisis comes in 1970 when her husband, Harry, leaves her. Significantly, it is George, in the guise of a Father Michael O’Herlihy, who brings about the couple’s reconciliation. Once again, analysis has its real-life rewards.

In spite of its occasional crossovers into the realm of domestic tragedy, Same Time, Next Year is first and foremost a comedy in the tradition of the 1970’s vintage Broadway. With a few notable exceptions, every situation has its comic moments, and the humor always has something to say about character growth. Doris’s discussion of what it is like to have grown from a high school dropout to a wealthy businesswoman is a typical example. Fulfillment, she tells George, is going into Gucci’s and buying five suede suits at seven hundred dollars each for her bowling team—simply to spite the unpleasant salesgirl. George, too, has come a long way in twenty years. The same man whose guilt sends him into paroxysms of despair in the 1950’s and 1960’s is able to confront Doris’s husband with amazing composure in 1970. Confessing that honesty is everything, George shamelessly tells Harry about the very intimate relationship he has had with Doris for twenty years. That his first and only conversation with Harry takes place over the telephone makes things a little easier for George and provides one of the play’s most humorous moments: “My name? My name is Father Michael O’Herlihy. No, she’s out saying a novena right now—Yes, my son, I’ll tell her to call you.”

One might easily point out any number of similar instances in the play, but the two above will serve to illustrate one final point about the humor in Same Time, Next Year. Doris is, from 1956 on, a woman motivated by one outstanding quality—spontaneity. She welcomes every moment as it comes, and she perfectly fits George’s definition of life (saying “yes”). So accustomed is the audience to her love of the moment that the episode in the Gucci store comes as no surprise; her reaction represents in every way the classic Doris. George’s long-distance triumph is equally revealing. His composure represents an achievement of great proportions, and he revels in it. He knows he is being clever, and so he stretches the moment for as long as he can make it last. Rarely is his self-perception at such a high point; his comic lines come at his own expense for three-quarters of the play. By 1970, a little of Doris has rubbed off on him, and the change is welcome. “I grew up with you,” he tells her in 1975, and his words have an unmistakable ring of truth to them. There is only one kind of ending for a play that has so much to celebrate, and that is the kind Doris loves best. “I love—happy—endings!” she says at the end. One feels that she and George have earned one all their own.

Tribute

Same Time, Next Year is one of Slade’s most celebrated works. His next play, Tribute, is a celebration, for the audience as well as for the characters. The occasion is Scottie Templeton’s fifty-first birthday and his first appearance in public since his near-fatal bout with leukemia. His twenty-year-old son, Jud, and his boss, Lou Daniels, have rented a theater in New York and gathered Scottie’s friends to pay tribute to the man who has left a legacy of love and laughter to all who know him. Lou opens the evening with a welcome (he knows many of us, he says) and an anecdote about Scottie and a crowded elevator. Dr. Gladys Petrelli, Scottie’s physician, appears next and relates a little story about how Scottie’s insomnia is contagious.

So much for the play’s first beginning. Tribute begins a second time in Scottie’s New York townhouse as Scottie entertains Sally Haines, a young model he met during an earlier stay in the hospital. The time is three months before the tribute to Scottie. As Sally leaves, Scottie’s ex-wife, Maggie Stratton, enters with Jud, whom Scottie has not seen for two years. Still hurting from his parents’ divorce and still feeling neglected, Jud is rather cold toward his father and informs him that he will be staying for only a week—he knows it will make little difference one way or the other to Scottie. Jud thus releases his first arrow, but he has brought a full quiver along with the rest of his baggage.

Scottie’s stubborn refusal to receive any medical treatment and Jud’s aloofness provide the raw materials for a series of confrontations over the next three months. Dr. Petrelli tells Scottie, who remains an incurable jester from start to finish, that using jokes to shut out reality is no longer going to work. She tries to enlist Jud’s help, but Jud’s “why me?” attitude has only hardened with age. He tells Sally, with whom he is now romantically involved, that his father is little more than a “court jester and a glorified pimp” (in fact, Scottie is a successful public relations man with a few false career starts in his past). Jud’s assessment of his father’s character only worsens when he accidentally walks in on his parents’ lovemaking. The situation looks hopeless until Lou talks to Jud. Scottie’s real talent, he tells Jud, is in making friends and in convincing them that life is better than it really is. He is worth saving, says Lou, and there are hundreds of people who feel the same way. Something clicks. Scottie and Jud have one more confrontation—this one about going to the hospital. Lou interrupts things in mid-crisis only long enough for Jud to pack Scottie’s suitcase. They are going to the hospital.

Thus, with a little help, Scottie creates one more friendship where before there was only indifference, and his new friend saves his life and then arranges its celebration. Back onstage for the tribute with which the play began, a handful of Scottie’s many friends have been telling stories in between the scenes from Scottie’s life, as Jud’s slides of his father illuminate the stage. Dr. Petrelli tells of the late hours she has kept because of Scottie’s simultaneous attacks of hypochondria and insomnia. Hilary, a retired prostitute, recounts the testimonial dinner that Scottie arranged for her ($250 a plate and a gold watch). Maggie tells a story about a special birthday dinner with Scottie, and Sally sums up what Scottie’s new friends in the audience must be saying to themselves by now: “Hi! Whenever I think of Scottie—I smile.”

Tribute thus celebrates the little man and dares to call him a hero in spite of his littleness. Life is Scottie Templeton’s battleground, and humor, love, and forgiveness are his weapons. He uses them wherever he finds tragedy and indifference—in elevators, on city buses, or in his own townhouse. Hundreds of people have applauded the funny man in the corduroy cap, and it is Slade’s intention that hundreds more will follow suit. Tribute offers no real clear-cut alternative once Jud’s conversion is complete, and Maggie’s enduring love for her ex-husband only confirms the rhetorical message of the play. Tribute has the effect of transforming the spectator (or reader) into a friend. By the end, the fact that Tribute is a play occurs to one only as an afterthought. Slade intends that one’s first thoughts should be about one’s new friends, and they are.

Romantic Comedy

Clive Barnes, in a 1978 New York Post article, has called Tribute an “honest truism” in a “serious funny” vein. A less serious play with less serious truths is Romantic Comedy. Slade has called the play a Valentine to the romantic playwrights of the 1930’s and 1940’s, and the phrase is especially apt. Romantic Comedy has all the seriousness of the genre it imitates (which is to say, very little) and all the day-to-day reality of a Valentine card. It achieves, therefore, precisely what it sets out to do: to close the doors on reality and engage in two hours of old-fashioned fun.

Jason Carmichael, a self-centered and highly successful playwright, is about to marry Allison St. James, a young society woman whose father is the ambassador to New Zealand. Anxiously awaiting his prenuptial rubdown at the hands of Boris, Jason walks naked into his study only to find that Phoebe Craddock, a young Vermont schoolteacher and an aspiring playwright, has arrived for a brief interview. She stays for the next ten years and coauthors one Broadway hit after another with the now clothed Jason.

Marriage and partnership go smoothly until Jason decides to use his body where his mind has failed to remedy a bad working relationship with one of his leading ladies. Wife and partner both exit, leaving Jason on his own for the first time in years. He writes nothing of any worth for two years, while Phoebe, now living in Europe with her journalist husband, Leo, writes a best-selling novel called Romantic Comedy. She returns to New York to write a stage play based on her novel and to enlist Jason’s help. The story is the one that the audience has been viewing onstage, with one supposed difference: Phoebe has “fantasized the relationship to make it interesting.”

Romantic Comedy—the play—is already a fantasy, however, and all the crises are resolved: Jason realizes that he loves Phoebe only after a mild heart attack brought on by her return causes him to reevaluate his life; Allison, with qualifications known only to herself, runs for Congress; Leo literally gives Phoebe to Jason and then runs off to Spain to write a novel; and Phoebe outdoes them all by staying with Jason to consummate their unspoken love and to finish the play. There is certainly ample room in Romantic Comedy for a little sadness to creep in, but the treatment always says otherwise. Romantic Comedy has something of the comedy of manners about it, and, like its eighteenth century forebears, it never opts for realism when a humorous approach presents itself. Still, as Jason remarks in defense of his own plays, it takes a considerable amount of thought to write a play about entertaining an audience for an evening and to make the whole thing look easy.

Special Occasions

Romantic Comedy has a whole tradition behind its less than serious view of life. Special Occasions is an altogether more innovative work that portrays life in all its bittersweet reality. Like Same Time, Next Year, Special Occasions follows the lives of two characters over a period of years (in this case, ten), charting their ups and downs and their gradual metamorphosis from strangers into friends. The structure is once again episodic, if less neatly so than before. Circumstances and other occasions bring Amy and Michael Ruskin together for brief moments every now and then, often when they least expect an encounter.

The play opens as Amy and Michael celebrate their fifteenth wedding anniversary and discuss their upcoming divorce. Amy’s drinking problem quickly suggests itself as one of the reasons behind their separation, and subsequent occasions soon confirm the suggestion as fact. The rest of the play studies the personal growth not only of Amy and Michael but also of their children—Stephen, Kelly, and Jennifer. Michael’s decision to undergo analysis marks his first step toward self-understanding, even if he does rehearse what he is going to say to his analyst. The audience next sees him at his mother’s funeral, where he plays the flute in compliance with the last request of the deceased. Amy turns up for the viewing but misses the service, attending instead the eulogy for an eighty-five-year-old Japanese woman. Alcohol is responsible for her mistake.

The funeral home incident leads Amy to her next special occasion: her first Alcoholics Anonymous meeting, the rough equivalent of Michael’s analysis. The occasion represents her first step toward personal well-being. Unlike Michael, she never deviates from the course she establishes for herself, although the years that follow unfold incident after incident to threaten her serenity. More often than not, it is Michael who suffers from what life offers over the years and Amy who pulls him through. The remaining special occasions follow in quick succession and include the unsuccessful production of Michael’s first play, Stephen’s high school graduation, Christmas Eve (an especially unfestive one), Amy’s marriage to Michael’s lawyer, the christening of Kelly’s son, Stephen’s car accident, and Michael’s fiftieth birthday. Special Occasions has more than enough material for a lifetime—indeed, for several lifetimes—but throughout, the emphasis is on how Amy and Michael come to terms with each occasion and, finally, with each other.

Two questions surface time and time again as Amy and Michael discuss their relationship and the circumstances that bring them together. The first, “Why didn’t you tell me?,” eventually gives way to the second, “Why did you tell me?” Amy’s answer to the second question sums up the theme of the play: Friends, she tells Michael, can tell friends anything. By the end of the play, Amy and Michael, still divorced, have established a firm friendship based on individual growth and shared experience. Like father and son in Tribute, they have reframed their relationship out of materials close at hand and can now look forward to filling in the details together. Michael proposes remarriage, but Amy, ever the more sensible of the two, suggests that they pause and enjoy the friendship that has taken ten years and some very special occasions to create.

The critical response to Special Occasions was generally unfavorable, but at least part of the negative reaction can be traced to the critics’ confusion over what to call the play. Special Occasions has been called a comedy, a situation comedy, a soap opera, a television drama, and a failure at each for allowing the others to enter unannounced, yet none of the labels captures the complexity of the play’s attitude toward life or the uniqueness of its design. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that Special Occasions is a record of life, complete with its high and its low moments, that seeks to be objective and cumulative. Clearly the play mixes comedy with pathos, but so does life, according to the playwright. The structure is equally mimetic: When one looks back, Slade seems to be saying, one remembers the special occasions. In Special Occasions, as in all Slade’s plays, looking back turns out to be a pleasurable experience.

Slade has said that no one has yet convinced him that life is not a comedy, and his plays clearly exist to give dramatic expression to his conviction that it is. Slade writes the way he does because he enjoys the sound of laughter and because life regularly affords laughable moments. All Slade’s plays are, in the final analysis, profiles in friendship. Doris and George, Scottie and Jud, Jason and Phoebe, Michael and Amy—all affirm Slade’s belief that time and a sense of humor can shape experience and bond friend to friend.

Fatal Attraction

Since Special Occasions, Slade has experimented with (for him) new dramatic forms as well as returned to the tried and true. Fatal Attraction and An Act of the Imagination are his attempts at writing mysteries. This murder mystery (not related to the popular film of the same title), centers on Blair, an attractive actress whose husband, Blair, has been fatally stabbed by a paparazzo, whom Blair slays during a rape attempt. Detective Gus does not initially suspect Blair, but her agent shows up and hints of a lesbian relationship with the actress. This play, like many of Slade’s other works, contains humorous moments. A Los Angeles Times critic, reviewing a 1990 Costa Mesa, California, production, criticized this mix of mystery and comedy.

Return Engagements

In Return Engagements, Slade returned to his time theme. The play consists of six short vignettes, focusing on a room at an inn over a period of twenty-three years. The action revolves around three couples. Bellhop Raymond and ambitious actress Daisy end up, respectively, owning the inn and achieving a modicum of success, as well as marrying. Arrogant writer Keith and his wife, Fern, are having affairs with, respectively, Dawn and Henry. In the end, it is Dawn and Henry who end up married.

An Act of the Imagination

In An Act of the Imagination, judged by some critics to be the more successful of the two mysteries, Slade again uses a writer as one of his main characters and revisits the theme of infidelity. British writer Arthur Putnam has written a novel about an adulterous man who is afraid that someone is trying to kill him. Arthur insists that the work is not based on his own life, but his editor and wife have some doubts. The slow-moving first act sets up the dullness of the life Arthur shares with his wife, Julia, then shakes it up with the arrival of a woman, Brenda, who claims to be Arthur’s lover and threatens blackmail. This mysterious women ends up dead. The much faster paced second act, in which police officer Fred Burchitt tries to unravel who killed Brenda, is filled with twists and turns that cause the audience to question what is real.

Same Time, Another Year

According to an article in the Los Angeles Times, Slade used the sequel to Same Time, Next Year to explore his concerns about aging. In Same Time, Another Year, Slade picks up the story of George and Doris in 1976, at the same country inn. In the sequel, filled with jokes about old age, George has a new, young girlfriend named Amber, and Doris has written a book about their affair, which she has sold to Random House. This return to the tried and true in the form of a sequel invited critics to contrast the play with the original, and many critics, including one writing for the Los Angeles Times, found the play wanting and its themes less appropriate for the 1990’s.

Bibliography

Beaufort, John. “A Twenty-four-Year Love Story.” Review of Same Time, Next Year, by Bernard Slade. The Christian Science Monitor, March 21, 1975. Takes a mildly remonstrative tone, with such phrases as “non-married couple” involved in “illicit, once-a-year trysts” representing “changing mores.” Good description of voice-over and set transitions, which “give the new comedy an underlying tone of reminiscent recognition.” The play is “slight and facile” but is “graced with humanity.”

Breslauer, Jan. “Same Writer, Same Characters, but Next Up, New Adventures.” Los Angeles Times, January 11, 1996, p. 1. In an interview, Slade discusses what motivated him to write the sequel to Same Time, Next Year and what message he hoped to convey.

Kerr, Walter. “Stage: Slade’s Romantic Comedy.” Review of Romantic Comedy, by Bernard Slade. The New Times, November 9, 1979, p. 63. Anthony Perkins and Mia Farrow star in this Broadway hit, which Kerr faults for some of the comic business and improbable laughs. He cites Perkins for his “smartness, high style, the lofty and chilly bon mot” and finds Farrow’s character, “eternally childlike, eternally composed,” to be well acted.

Genzlinger, Neil. "Bernard Slade, 89, Dies; ‘Partridge Family’ Creator and Playwright." The New York Times, 31 Oct. 2019, www.nytimes.com/2019/10/31/theater/bernard-slade-dead.html. Accessed 7 July 2020.

Watt, Douglas. “Even in Skilled Hands, Being Glib Isn’t Easy.” Review of Romantic Comedy, by Bernard Slade. New York Daily News, November 9, 1979. This review is slightly different in viewpoint and tone from those in other New York newspapers. Watt credits Slade’s artistry, mentions the earlier success with Same Time, Next Year, and cites Anthony Perkins’s and Mia Farrow’s personalities, which bring the characters to light in a way that the genre needs.

Wilson, Edwin. “Laughter on Broadway.” The Wall Street Journal, November 9, 1979. Wilson examines Slade’s handling of the writing craft and discusses how the play intentionally works against the form: “Mr. Slade . . . capitulates” to the form in the end, in a noble effort, but “has not solved his [dramatic] problem” entirely.

Winer, Laurie. “Same Jokes, Another Play: It’s Deja Vu in Pasadena.” Review of Same Time, Another Year, by Bernard Slade. Los Angeles Times, January 16, 1996, p. 1. In this review of Same Time, Another Year, after the opening of its world premiere at the Pasadena Playhouse, Winer criticizes the sequel for lacking the interaction between the two characters that enlivened the initial play and for containing too many old-age jokes.