The basic dramatic proposition [of The Beard] is arresting enough: to bring Jean Harlow and Billy the Kid together in eternity, face to face in the sort of other-worldly middle-class room which Sartre employed for very different purposes in No Exit, and have them go at one another…. [The first line spoken by the Harlow character:] "Before you can pry any secrets from me, you must first find the real me. Which one will you pursue?"

This ritual phrase runs throughout the play, often to good effect, and is the verbal mode and talisman of one plane of its operations. The other verbal procedure may be conveyed, in what is literally its minor key, by Harlow's snarling remark a little later on: "You're a sack of shit!" This vocabulary is undeniably as "dirty" as anything the American stage has ever known … yet it is in no real sense...