Touch

Joel Schwartz's last play, Mine Eyes See Not So Far, was a long tortuous examination of single character heightened by a fantasy play-within-a-play. His latest offering, Touch, takes on a whole family with much of the same dramatist's skill, more humor, but unfortunately less discipline. Despite Eyes' inordinate length, the various parts were pulled together in a complex web; in Touch there are scenes which are merely extraneous and sometimes distracting from the main action of the play. This state of affairs is doubly frustrating since parts of Touch are not merely good, but excellent.

Touch's family is made up of dull, joke-cracking father Jack; shallow, bourgeois mother Ruth; precocious and sensitive son Tom (he's just won a national English contest); and maiden but equally sensitive aunt Emily. The action of the play centers around bringing Tom and Emily together, breaking down the walls of alienation which are physically represented by their separate garret-like rooms. Emily speaks to Tom only through monologues into a tape recorder, a device which Mr. Schwartz uses to great advantage.

Two things rescue Touch from the usual family conflict study. One is its humor; the other, some exceptionally good characterizations which are performed extremely well. The humor is apparent even from the opening of the play when the downstairs toilet is reported out of commission. When Ruth complains about her bladder, fixit husband Jack suggests a milk bottle and retorts, "Learn to aim. I have." But after a great deal of water sloshing in buckets the crisis is resolved. Characterizations are often achieved through a single line. When Ruth speaks of herself as cultered she says, "Red wine with meat and white wine with fish," and then continues to clean the plastic slipcovers on the furniture. The parents are parodies and are played accordingly by John Burslem and Jane Bullock.

But even though the play enters around a celebration for the son, the son, the true central character is Aunt Emily, cutting pictures from magazines, dictating taped letters to Tom, feigning deafness. And with Fran Ansley, the role assumes an even greater dimension. The wispy hair, the uncertain movements, the soft voice all register with the audience as perfect. While the action downstairs often approaches gag situations, and the action in Tom's room (like the embarrassing scene with girlfriend Ellen) is often tiresome, Aunt Emily and her world come across as real and sympathetic. When she and Tom come together at the end, we not only believe it, we want to believe it.