Put Them All Together

Once upon an unsophisticated time, a playwright could draw laughs from an audience by just a nod towards Sex. But then pristine T.V. came along. The movies, sensing competition, announced that they had grown up and had learned that children do not grow on trees. Everyone hailed this as a sign of maturity, except of course the playwrights, who felt that they might be losing some of their audience if Screen sex became as naughty as Stage sex. So they decided to make their scripts really disgusting. Boston has already seen one of these New Look comedies this season--Black-Eyed Susan. Another is now in town.

Somehow, practically the entire plot of Put Them All Together involves the efforts of a precious 29-year-old fop to rid himself of his mother's apron strings by sharing his bed with her attractive nurse. To varying degrees, the rest of his family approves of his venture, and forms a cheering section outside his bedroom door. Overnight a remarkable change takes place: by dawn the young man has shed his drab finales and pale timidity for a West Coast sport coat and a jut-jawed aggressiveness. This action is marked by an exchange of witticisms which in places would hardly do credit to a reform school stag. For authors Theodore Hirsch and Jeanette Patton, this may be high comedy. More nearly, it is a wake over comedy's grave.

It seems incredible that such a plot can become a play, and to be sure, an outline does not do it justice. Put Team All Together has some clever lines and a certain among of slick repartee. But nearly all the good lines are given to the nurse, played by Barbara Lawrence. The authors wrote the part as a jaded cynic; Miss Lawrence plays it as a raucous floozy. As a result, the lines sound completely improbable, and what humor there is falls embarrassingly flat. Miss Lawrence at least brings ample physical equipment to her duties.

Faye Banter gets top billing in the show, and her portrayal of the mother (put them all together you've got MOTHER. . .) is engagingly domineering. Hers is the usual Junior-League-25-years-after sort of role, however, and her comic talents are barely exercised. Arthur Starch, as her son, alternately months and shouts his lines. And his boudoir transformation obviously seems as preposterous to him as the stilted lover scene through which the authors wring him in the first act. It is not his fault that the growing pains have a few audible creaks.

The best performance, and the best comic part in the whole play, belongs to George Turner, the stuffed shorted, Edwardian butler. Turner's carefully measured pace and diction add a rare ludicrosity to the otherwise shabby proceedings. Joan Wet more, as the young man's sister, brings a facile smugness to some of the play's better lines.

The affair takes place in one of those stuffy Victorian drawing rooms which playwrights thinks is characteristic of Long Island society, and Emanuel Gerald's sets are garish enough to bore even the most undiscriminating theatergoer by the time he sees them for two hours. But then they are characteristic of the play itself. Put them all together, or take them one by one: in any case, all you have is a series of two-line jokes on a subject which, by now, has been cowed into submission.