["Talley's Folly"] is set in a boathouse—very gingerbready in design—during an evening in 1944 when Sally Talley, aged thirty-one, a spinster with leftish leanings, is courted and won by Matt Friedman, aged forty-two, an accountant from St. Louis…. All the action is the difficult, ultimately successful attempt by each of them to pin the other down. Matt, teasing, devious, and jokey, eventually talks of his family's being on the run from country to country in Europe during his childhood, and Sally, proud and private, eventually tells of her engagement as a young girl to a local boy—an engagement that was terminated when she became ill with tuberculosis—and when they have finished we are aware that the reason that neither of them has married before is exactly the reason that they should marry now. (pp. 84, 86)

The ninety-four minutes [of the play] … are rather short on content...