The Tunnel of Love: A Play (Acting Edition) (adapted from the novel by Mr. de Vries)

Joseph Fields; Peter de Vries

ISBN 10: 0573617031 / ISBN 13: 9780573617034

Published by Samuel French, 1957

About this Item

/1957 EDITION, NEW/ I HAVE THOUSANDS OF PLAYS AND MUSICALS IN MY LISTINGS/.

Seller Inventory # SKU0006904

Bibliographic Details

• Title: The Tunnel of Love: A Play (Acting Edition) (adapted from the novel by Mr. de Vries)
• Publisher: Samuel French
• Publication Date: 1957
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0573617031
• ISBN 13: 9780573617034
• Binding: Paperback
• Condition: New
• Weight: 3 ounces

About this title

Synopsis

Comedy

Joseph Fields and Peter de Vries, adapted from the novel by Mr. de Vries

Characters: 2 male, 4 female

Interior Set

Tom Ewell played the Broadway part of a suburban husband in a 5 year childless marriage. He and his wife decide to adopt a baby, but a loud mouth neighbor upsets the apple cart when the adoption investigator comes to call. However, not to be outdone, Ewell finds himself in the clutches of the investigator, who has suddenly turned color. Later she announces that she is pregnant and is going off to have the baby. She will see that the man and his wife receive the child in due time through the agency. Shortly after the baby arrives, however, the wife learns of the matter and starts packing to go home to Mother. But it turns out that the adopted baby was not fathered by the husband, and also that the wife is now herself pregnant; and matters are mended.

"It offers laugh after laugh." N.Y. World Telegram & Sun.

Review

"The funniest serious writer to be found on either side of the Atlantic."--Kingsley Amis

"A humorous novel of the choicest order."--Charles J. Rolo "New York Times "

"A trio of long out-of-print books, republished this fall by the University of Chicago Press, underscores the satirical brilliance of a mostly forgotten humorist. De Vries skewered a distinctly male form of idiocy, demonstrated by characters who are witty, well-spoken, and lacking what a later generation would call emotional intelligence."--Jonathan Hiskes "Curator "

"De Vries was an editor at "Poetry" magazine, a staff writer at "The New Yorker," and the author of some two dozen of the wittiest novels you'll ever read, including the masterworks "The Blood of the Lamb" and "Slouching Toward Kalamazoo," as well as "The Tunnel of Love" and "Reuben, Reuben," just resurrected in handsome paperback by the University of Chicago Press. . . . In "The Tunnel of Love," especially, about the wedlocked hurly-burly of restive suburbanites, his Twainian one-liners come like a cataract. . . . Only those with a consummate lack of cleverness wield the word 'clever' as an insult, and De Vries demonstrates just how much can be done with a creative intelligence charged by the clever and satirical and ironic. Let us now praise those saints at the University of Chicago Press who possess the smarts and good taste to return to print a peerless American maestro of wit."--William Giraldi "The Millions "

"Quick with quips so droll and witty, so penetrating and precise that you almost don't feel them piercing your pretensions, Peter De Vries was perhaps America's best comic novelist not named Mark Twain. . . . It's something of a crime against literature that De Vries, whose novels of the 1950s and early '60s made wonderful sport of postwar striving, the middle-class move to the suburbs, and generational clashes that would render major cultural shifts just a few years hence, has mostly been forgotten. . . . Literature--in the form of the University of Chicago Press--is making amends for its lapses by re-issuing the best of De Vries' works, five comic tomes long out of print."--Sam McManis "Sacramento Bee "

A humorous novel of the choicest order. --Charles J. Rolo "New York Times ""

The funniest serious writer to be found on either side of the Atlantic. --Kingsley Amis"

A trio of long out-of-print books, republished this fall by the University of Chicago Press, underscores the satirical brilliance of a mostly forgotten humorist. De Vries skewered a distinctly male form of idiocy, demonstrated by characters who are witty, well-spoken, and lacking what a later generation would call emotional intelligence. --Jonathan Hiskes "Curator ""

De Vries was an editor at "Poetry" magazine, a staff writer at "The New Yorker," and the author of some two dozen of the wittiest novels you ll ever read, including the masterworks "The Blood of the Lamb" and "Slouching Toward Kalamazoo," as well as "The Tunnel of Love" and "Reuben, Reuben," just resurrected in handsome paperback by the University of Chicago Press. . . . In "The Tunnel of Love," especially, about the wedlocked hurly-burly of restive suburbanites, his Twainian one-liners come like a cataract. . . . Only those with a consummate lack of cleverness wield the word clever as an insult, and De Vries demonstrates just how much can be done with a creative intelligence charged by the clever and satirical and ironic. Let us now praise those saints at the University of Chicago Press who possess the smarts and good taste to return to print a peerless American maestro of wit. --William Giraldi "The Millions ""

A decade ago, the off-kilter universe created by Peter De Vries was almost forgotten his work out of print, relegated to the shelves and Web sites of antiquarian booksellers. But thanks to the University of Chicago Press, which has reissued attractive paperback editions of five of his books so far, the emergency is over. . . . "The Tunnel of Love" [is] an agreeable, even fizzy portrait of postwar suburban America. . . . De Vries s books certainly respect the conventions of plot and character, but his heart is elsewhere with his sly, even subversive wit that detonates paragraph after paragraph as the narratives unfold. . . . In the end, the main characters become older if not much wiser, but their goings-on are accompanied by cocktail-party chatter that shows off De Vries s ear for malapropisms (a woman confesses Did I ever tell you about my aberration? ), epigramic observations ( There are times when parenthood seems nothing but feeding the mouth that bites you ) and one-liners, some of which have become immortal, among them: Deep down, he s shallow! From the start, his comedic gifts were abundant and turned out to be far more enduring than those of such contemporaries as S.J. Perelman and even James Thurber. --Jeffrey Frank "Washington Post ""