Horovitz's Complaint

MAYBE HOROVITZ'S PLAY qualifies as social realism, exposes the plight of urban youth, lays a slice-of-life on you--pick one of the above and man your stations, please. Your assignments should be pretty clear: each critic prises a skein of dialogue from the script and analyzes its relevance from the vantage of the ideological crow's nest he has shimmied into.

A few hints to get you started. The Marxist intellectual could scrutinize the ethnic bigotry and confusion, really very naive, of this pair of street-smart, macho New York adolescents. It's kind of culturally telling, you know, how they free associate from Turks and Indians to Native Americans and that most pious national holiday, Thanksgiving, then face off over whether or not their old ladies hump gobblers. The sociologist from HEW will tell us why Murph doesn't have anyone to go home to and devise training programs for sweet lady social workers so they don't give knives (for whittling wood) to hoodlums on a rap for slicing kids. Somewhere near the middle of the play, the Irish character confides in his buddy, Joey, "Hey, you know it's terrific what you can learn just standing around on a corner with a schmuck like you." I suspect this is the moral of the story, and the critic with a feel for life's colorful nitty gritty can take it from here.

Now this reviewer grew up on the plains of Kansas, and although she hates to cop out on questions of social relevance, she figures that the playwright wouldn't set any store by the understanding of a Midwestern hick. For Horovitz the Bronx seems to be emblematic of a couple of delinquents hazing an uncomprehending immigrant and each other on a street corner after everyone else in town has scurried into their apartments for the night. No doubt, then, hailing from Kansas means you've whiled your precious life away watching the wheat push and sway up from the clodded earth. The Indian Wants the Bronx is a half-hour exercise in existential schmaltz. West Side Story and The Wizard of Oz are cliches, too, but they exude wit and romance where The Indian only hits you over the head with sociological pretension.

Along with thematic shallowness, the play suffers from dramatic ineptitude. During one of their continuing series of brawls, Joey flings his crony Murph out of the audience's field of view. It takes Murph a full ten minutes to find his way back on stage, and when Joey, his curiosity rightfully piqued, grills him as to what could have occupied him for so long in the middle of the desolate night, Murph fails to provide an adequate answer. Not that the audience cares much. But it's kind of annoying to be faced with evidence of writer's block in a finished production.

And then there's the self-consciously artistic way Horovitz sandwiches the action between the refrain of a popular song wafting in from the wings. The sappy, off-key message is that Murph and Joey, poor lost crime-ridden souls, are "lookin' for your door and can't find it." Horovitz's technique is too glib, too conventional.

HAPPILY, director Paul Suchecki has offset the poorly chosen script with a fine pair of actors. Ed Redlich's Murph swaggers and spits his lines with the air of someone who is not too bright but whose instinct will take care of him; he's like a chubby rodent that senses when to burrow and when to flee. Alan Stock plays a jittery boy with a cramped intelligence. His Joey is more attuned to emotions than is Murph: the taut nervousness in his shying gait, as though his hip joints were connected to his insteps by elastic bands, seems to stem from his sensitivity to other people's sadness. These actors use each other deftly--dodging, fondling, intercepting and abusing one another's banter and bodies. The only remaining character, the Indian, functions as a mere punching bag, a prop that's hardly more human than the bus stop sign. His two-dimensionality is another flaw on the playwright's part, and about all Suchecki (who acts as well as directs) can do in this role is loiter on stage looking inane and pitiable.

I've never heard of Israel Horovitz before, but I wonder if he's playwright by trade. Just guessing, I'd call him a former New York social worker harried with guilt and looking to stir up public sympathy for and insight into juvenile delinquency. The form this effort has taken in The Indian Wants the Bronx is, well, kind of quaint.