Mr. Ooze

Mr. Ooze is a new play about Harvard undergraduate life by a senior named Blair Brown. It is a play which contains a good deal of very funny writing--not all of it, I think, wholly conscious--about the ridiculousnesses of that life; unlike its obvious parallel, Love with a Harvard Accent, however, it is a play that I'm afraid Mr. Brown hopes will be taken seriously. And that would be absurd.

As far as I can make it out, Mr. Ooze revolves around a great, gaping artistic lug of a hero, one Wilson Stone, revered by his friends as "a fantastic guy: he's kind of screwed up." Wilson's friends number his roommate Mike, a genial caricature of an earnest economics major, who says of his future employers "It's not every day a bank gets a chance to have a summa," and a Groton-and-unspecified-club archetype named Peter, who calls himself the "narrative thread" of the show (it is a bald-faced lie). Several of these people have girls: Wilson a fresh-faced intense type, who could have graduated only from Putney; and Mike a pancake-faced, blase' type, who could have come from anywhere. Peter has none; he is going to go to Law School.

Well, all of these undergraduates sit around in Peters' room and talk about each other--certainly a compulsive undergraduate activity. That much rings true. The conversations themselves don't. They're all supposedly seniors, but their talk gets awfully sophomoric: when they want to be funny, these five people are often amusing (or at least they often amuse each other), but when they start being serious, involved, and in love, which they seem to do with a distressing regularity, then all the talk gets horribly embarrassed, and quite worthless, something like the dialogue in Cold Wind in August. Peter says things like "We're just excuses--poor excuses for what we could be." And Wilson, the hero, mind you, tells us--tells us twice, in fact, he's so struck with the phrase: "Gone, gone, the living past is gone, gagged by gloomy twilight."

Occasionally, and only occasionally, Mr. Brown does seem to come inadvertently close to some of the real sufferings of college students. An ex-girl friend of Wilson's writes him an awkward, semi-literate letter which in a very Holden Caulfieldish way does articulate a few of the longings of a coed, and some of the pathos. All too often, however, Mr. Brown's cries of pain come from the same gland that secretes cheap emotionalism, and all too often, again, these cries seemed aimed at someone not in the general audience.

So, too, with the amusing bits. A blond girl in a red coat sitting directly in front of me moaned delightedly every time one character opened his mouth. Obviously Mr. Brown has carefully dissected some fellow she knew very well, and I and everyone else had never met. The play, then, alternates soap opera with a monstrous in-joke. It is not a play that will be widely appreciated.

And there's one more thing against it; Mr. Ooze himself. He, it turns out, is a four-year-old child who has had the misfortune to be born without any bones (he is played manfully by a sackful of brown Jello). His parents' names are Joseph and Mary Carpenter. Mr. Brown's tasteless and callous sacrilege would be dreadful if it had any meaning.

Of the performance, I wish I could say nothing. The direction, by a gentleman whom, for purpose of argument, I'll call George Spelvin, was not visible to the naked eye, and the acting, with three exceptions, was atrocious. The three were Ellen Jameson (Wilson's girl, Scarlett) who, a Putney girl herself, managed to give her ingenue role a certain amount of real emotion; Susan Stockard (Peter's sister Suzy), who plays a too-much-too-soon high school girl with wacky charm; and Pete Foster, a Leverett House janitor, whose impersonation of himself is a stroke of consummate artistry.

The CRIMSON ad for Mr. Ooze advised one not to waste 40 cents on a cheap novel. Well, even setting aside the sub-freezing temperatures under that wretched dome, the alternative the ad offers is no bargain. Mr. Ooze is pretty much of a primordial mess.