The Theatregoer Next Time I'll Sing to You at the Leeb through March 7

NEXT TIME I'LL SING TO YOU is the non sequitur title of the James Saunders play which opened the spring season at the Loeb last night. And it's nice to know that well, next time the playwright will sing to us. Yes, that's nice to know-and yet, that doesn't tell you much about what the playwright is doing this time around. So let me due you in: this time he is talking. And talking and talking and talking. After two hours, I thought I would go out of my mind.

People in and around the theatre tend to call plays like this one "interesting." After I read it several months ago. I myself tended to refer to it as "interesting" to my friends and ex-wives. Indeed I found it not only interesting but playable. I thought this work, Saunders first, might even be exciting in the theatre. But-dear friends and ex-wives-you never know until the product is as they say. on the counter, and I have now discovered I was wrong. Director David Boorstin does every thing he can for Saunders play and yet the play emerges as a stiff.

For the record, this comedy, if you can call it that, is a bastard child of absurdist theatre. It is a play about everything and nothing. Before the evening draws to its long-awaited close we hear aphorisms about God. free will, existence, time space. love, and yes, death. Nothing is real. Everything is real. We are alive. We are dead... All this is fine, but we have heard it before. In the best absurdist plays, it has been sung to us.

Next Time might best be titled Weding for Waiting for Godot. Whereas in Beeken's master-piece we live through the plight of human beings waiting for that never-to-arrive something that will make sense of it all, in Saunders' play we merely hear the playwright's mouthpieces talk about waiting for that something. Beckett did not explain: he showed he dramatized. (There is a lot of truth to the old cliche that the silences are as important as any of the lines in Godot. ) Saunders merely feeds us truisms like "The point is that he existed" or "How can you do what you're doing when you don't know what you're supposed to be doing?" As in Godot nothing happens in Next Time. But Saunders has not turned the inaction into theatre: there is no play here.

FOR DIRECTOR BOORSTIN. my heart goes out. He has ransacked his highly fertile comic imagination to give the work life, and his failure reflects not a bit on his ample theatrical skills. His staging is sprinkled with Godot -like schtick and much of it is amusing. I also liked some tricks he did with recorded music and the stage itself during the show's first moments.

On the other hand. I must say that the old Locb habits of overproduction (absent this year) are, alas, being replaced by new rituals. Once again, we have props and backstage machinery in front of us for the play's duration: once again, the house lights are turned on at various times during the action; once again, there are entrances and exits through the aisles. In the case of Next Time these touches create an informal atmosphere that reinforces the script's essential lack of theatricality.

The actors all work hard, and, thanks to Boorstin's incredibly swift blocking, almost succeed in making the show move. Unfortunately, Saunders has given them attitudes rather than parts. In this sense. George Sheanshang is magnificently fiery as the play's quasi-narrator, and Virginia Cook, a fine comedienne, plays confusion in the best Morton Lorne manner. Leigh Woods, as an actor playing a hermit whose life is investigated by the others, makes his character live in the brief sections where the playwright lets him live. But most of the time, Saunders has the hermit's tragedy described to us, rather than letting us see it for ourselves.

Lest you think the evening was a total loss, however. I should point out that there was an incredible old lady sitting across from me in the theatre. She must have been about 75, and she was wearing a trim midnight blue dress and a wild orange velvet hat. Her face was fierce and dark, but she stayed for the whole play, perhaps to see what the Harvard freaks were up to. I don't think she saw what she came for, but her face and her hat made the evening endurable for at least one member of the audience. I hope any of you who choose to go to the Loeb this week are as lucky. Check your horoscopes.