Bernard Slade's two-character play about an adulterous motel romance carried on one weekend a year for twenty-five years. Robert Mulligan orchestrates it in basic two-shots, smooth, easygoing. Part of the reason it doesn't bog down is that the characters undergo such drastic changes during the five-year skips in the action that you sometimes have the feeling you are watching separate one-acters, Plaza Suite-style, with the same actors taking on different roles. (The biggest switcheroo comes when the woman metamorphoses from a slobby Berkeley activist into an expensively groomed high-class caterer, and the man goes from a three-piece-suited Republican businessman to a mellowed-out cocktail-bar pianist.) These drastic changes also save the author from having to do any subtle and truthful delineation of character growth. The memory-lane mood of the thing is effortlessly caught by the historical montages which bridge the time jumps (Mulligan finds a spot in there for a still from his own To Kill a Mockingbird) and by having Johnny Mathis croon the theme song. With Ellen Burstyn and Alan Alda. (1978) — Duncan Shepherd
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