Mad About Purgatory

IF YOU were Mad about Mintz, you may well be disappointed by Philip LaZebnik's latest offering. American in Purgatory is basically warmed over Mintz; shorter and more tightly-knit than its predecessor, it features many of the same actors bandying about similar jokes and singing similar songs within the now almost predictable absurdist framework that has become a LaZebnik trademark. Somehow it all seemed a lot fresher the first time around.

Unlike Harvard's other student playwrights--the authors of Bicentennial Follies, for example--LaZebnik draws his chief inspiration from literary classics rather than from the contemporary American scene. His technique, like Tom Stop-pard's in Rosencrantz and Guildenstein are Dead, is to abstract well-known characters from their original dramatic setting and place them in an absurd world where they toy with the conventions of language, and quest--unsuccessfully, of course--for the meaning of their existence.

Dant's Purgatorio and Shakespeare's King Lear serve the same function for Purgatory as Milton's Paradise Lost did for Mintz, supplying characters, plot details and many of the show's cleverest lines. The thematic link between the Lear and Purgatorio motifs is the search for a missing woman who represents some kind of an ideal. For LaZebnik's Lear, who is both actor and director in a play about himself, it is Cordelia who is lost, while for Thomas, the young male lead, it is the elusive Adeline, who takes the place of Dante's Beatrice. Since Tome is also the name of the fool in King Lear, it's not too surprising, given the workings of LaZebnik's mind, that characters from the two classics should discover their lives and identities intricately entangled in the course of a brilliant, firework-like denouement.

On the way to that denouement, LaZebnik has contrived a few good songs and some priceless comic sequences. Unfortunately, though, his creative abandon is undisciplined by a critical eye; and, as a result, the wheat of LeZebnik's on-the-mark parodies remains mixed with the chaff of puns and punch lines that fall pitifully flat.

Among the most blatant offenders are the clusters of fruit jokes which constitute one of the show's main running gags. In a world where "things are seldom what they seem to be" and real decisions are impossible, LaZebnik's emphasis on immediate satisfaction of the appetites--in this case, hunger--makes a certain kind of sense. Nevertheless, there's only so much humor to be squeezed from a pear that turns out to be someone's fiance, or from a shepherdess blowing on a banana. And what's only vaguely amusing the first time around hardly improves with repetition.

By contrast, a gag which works far better involves King Lear's obsession with popcorn. A supposedly dignified, elderly figure running around shouting "Pop, pop, Jiffy Pop," is ridiculous enough to be funny, and the Act II opener, "The Popcorn Ballet," which features men with silken flame neckties trying to pop female characters dressed as resistant kernels of corn, is one of the most excitingly choreographed and outrageous numbers in the show.

While Mad about Mintz was salvaged by a stunning second act, some of the most effective sequences in American in Purgatory come near the beginning. LaZebnik is at his sharpest in a parody of psychoanalysis, where the analyst (David Reiffel) exults in his patient's lapses of memory and tells him pedantically that his suffering is necessary, since "only through suffering can you achieve pain." In another beautifully controlled sequence, an imaginary monopoly game becomes a metaphor for life; in this game without dice, escape from jail is possible only through strategems appropriated directly from The Wizard of Oz.

While Doug Hughes, essentially repeating the straight role he played in Mintz, sings with a lovely tenor, the rest of the cast demonstrate convincingly that they were chosen on the basis of their comic rather than musical talents. Exhibiting a superb sense of timing, Debra Smigel delivers the best performance of the night as Dr. Olson, the pompous social scientist who is helpless without her Ph.D. Jackie Osherow has some fine moments as the fruit-crazed Goneril, and Sarah McCluskey as Adeline pronounces some less than stellar lines with a cute Marilyn Monroe pout.

If the musical proficiency of the cast is unexceptional, so is most of LaZebnik's score. LaZebnik is a better lyricist than composer, but even some of his lyrics--like the blackly humorous "Happy When" a nostalgic ode to murderous wives--are not particularly inspired. Among the show's best numbers are Lear's quizzical lament, "Where is Cordelia?" expertly delivered by Stephen Morris, and the finale, "So What If Hope is Gone," which suggests a way of coping with unhappy endings.

In this latest venture, LaZebnik envisions purgatory as a vast, bug-infested wasteland, where decision-making has degenerated into the acceptance of "viable alternatives, second choices, trial balloons." Built upon repetition--for where there are no choices, there is no real escape from the past--it is a vision which, hopefully, does not augur a similar fate for LaZebnik: being condemned to write the same show over and over again.