I don't want to slam a play that was perfectly pleasant to sit through, but there is nothing about this material that needs to be put on a stage--it's deeply and fundamentally undramatic, or at least, Trillin didn't find a way to make it dramatic. A very mild cup of cocoa.
While I agree with Mr Greene wholeheartedly about the book, I am going to have to disagree about the play, and especially about the chiggers. They were _not_ the highlight of Trillin’s asking Alice out for their first date. That honor belongs to the Burmese takin, allegedly the smelliest animal on earth, and then resident at the Bronx Zoo. The dialog about it was not in the book (and indeed seems to contradict it), and was the first point at which my wife had to rebuke me for laughing too much. The sad parts of the play were equally moving, though harder to joke about. For those of you who have not read it, the book was the best monument by a widower to his late wife since the Taj Mahal, and the play is a worthy and splendidly-acted interpretation of it.
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