Jean Kerr is one of the first women to hitch herself up to a typewriter and spin the straw of her not completely suburban existence into publishing gold. She is now as she was back when her children were eating the daisies, an intelligent, irreverent, articulate writer, and ["How I Got to Be Perfect"] is exactly what the public has come to expect of her. Exactly! Here is a sample of her chapter headings: "Partying Is Such Sweet Sorrow," "My Marshmallow Fudge Wonder Diet,&#...

[If "King of Hearts," a] comedy by Jean Kerr and Eleanor Brooke …, achieves success, it will be because it contains some of the funniest lines to be heard on any New York stage today. If it should fail, it will be because of something discomfiting in it. I was almost constantly amused by it. But toward the end of the first act I began to be reminded of an experience I had long ago on reading a play by the English humorist Saki. The Saki play was hilarious from first to last, with an inc...

Jean Kerr, who is in the process of becoming one of the country's foremost humorists, would no doubt stand up and scream bloody murder at any implication that her work is sociological source material. Well, scream away, dear Mrs. Kerr. Because it is. (p. 393)

Jean Kerr's, "Lunch Hour," takes place in the present and is set in the hip and swinging Hamptons—but don't give such outward signs of trendiness another thought. Mrs. Kerr has written just the sort of old-fashioned comedy that one expects from the author of "Mary, Mary": a romantic entertainment in which the characters are as civilized and charming as the stylish couples who populated Broadway drawing rooms a generation ago. And why not? There's nothi...

The difference between style and front turns out to be precisely the problem that plagues Mrs. Kerr's title character [in Poor Richard], a poet with a vague resemblance to the late Dylan Thomas and the late Brendan Behan. This poet, named Richard Ford, is in a fallow period of his creativity following an unexpected best-seller, and he is acutely aware that much of what he says and does is front. As he puts it, "Talking is a noise I make to stop people from noticing that I have nothing whatsoev...

["Poor Richard"] is not only marked by the slick style and literate wit to which the playwright has accustomed us. It also boasts, advertently or not, a cogent bit of near-self-criticism, plunk in the second of its three acts. "Will you stop being so bloody charming?" our impassioned and impatient ingenue finally demands. And poor Richard, in one of several anguished moments of self-revelation, explains away his slick style and literate wit with "It's a noise I make...

[Jean Kerr is] not writing about anything new or unusual. In fact, some of the pieces that go to make up [The Snake Has All the Lines] have a definite air of being written to order on a preselected subject. Another casual on being frightened of flying, one thinks, more than fifty years after the Wright brothers' adventure at Kitty Hawk? The heart sinks, the mind boggles. Then Mrs. Kerr remarks, "I feel about airplanes the way I feel about diets," and I defy you to stop reading. Are you ...

It is Jean Kerr's special mode to create domestic episodes out of the mock-heroic survival of the quiet daily desperations and for this there is an enormous appreciation, even thirst, in her audiences. Her characters are honest and unpretentious about their own confusions, and have no illusions about their cosmic size, often affecting laconic self-mockery to adjust their eyes after some blur of shifting values or double standards. Some homey sensibility, we are given to believe, remains in focus as l...

The wives of New York Times drama critics should not write plays—at least not such feeble ones as Lunch Hour…. The plot concerns Oliver, a psychiatrist who for obscure reasons prefers to call himself a marriage counselor and whose wife, Nora, is betraying him with a millionaire who does nothing and calls it so. This handsome fellow, Peter, has married for obscure reasons a dopey, homely, neurotic child-wife, Carrie, and is now about to elope, for no less obscure reasons, with the seemingly icy...

Jean Kerr is a skillful playwright, a brilliant wit and one of the most charming and delightful women in the world. All of those qualities have gone into her new comedy, "Finishing Touches,"… and I think it is almost certain to be the latest Broadway success. But, as much as I enjoyed it …, I had a few reservations about its effectiveness. It is funny, it is wise and it is believable in characterizations and story. It also has the virtue of getting better as it goes along, and it...

By throwing a few brains around where they are not too conspicuous, Jean and Walter Kerr have written a capital light revue, "Touch and Go."… Being literate people who can read as well as sit down in the theatre, the Kerrs know what is going on in the manners of our time, and they say so with charm and impishness in the best stage comment on current foibles since "Lend an Ear."… A bilious theatregoer might take exception to having a blues song sung in a 1949 revue. ...

[In "Lunch Hour"] the playwright has slightly but crucially misjudged the time and the place and the people that her comedy purports to be concerned with. The slighter the content of a comedy—and the content of "Lunch Hour" is very slight indeed—the stronger and more accurate its particularities must be…. Adultery is evidently a topic no more sympathetic to Mrs. Kerr than it would be to the Bobbsey Twins, and she approaches it in a fashion so gingerly that we...

"Finishing Touches" is the ghost of Broadway past and, honestly, one of the strangest sights I've ever seen on a stage. In this play, Jean Kerr (its author) has confronted the modern sexual revolution and decided that it never happened. Her story is about a well-established marriage that approaches crisis when the husband, an associate professor and presumably a grown man, admits that he is falling in love with one of his students even though (as we later see) the student knows nothing ...

I was just plain disappointed [with Jean and Walter Kerr's "Goldilocks"]. It is lavish and pretentious and good looking; it is occasionally extremely funny, with Jean Kerr lines, and much of it is melodious. But the story is woefully slight and unresolved and the general production lacks ingenuity. Probably like everyone else, I expected too much…. It struck me that [the] … rather wispy plot was soon lost in the weight of the production. There was no concentration on a che...

Everything basic in "Goldilocks" is on a small scale—the sardonic story of the double-dealing director of silent movies, the diamond-hard wit of the dialogue, the dexterity of the lyrics, the well-bred charm of Leroy Anderson's music. But Walter Kerr, director and co-author with his wife, Jean, has conceived of "Goldilocks" as a full sized Broadway musical….

Jean Kerr is a witty woman, and the dialogue she has invented for "Mary, Mary" … is frequently fresh and funny. Admittedly, her jests are aimed at familiar targets—alimony, income taxes, food fads, Hollywood, sex, and beauty salons, for example—but she has a neat way with a phrase and her observations are usually astute. She also has the happy faculty of being able to turn off the drumfire of gags and let her characters display, without mawkishness, some very tender emotio...