Pop Tarts and Pathos

SLEEPY SOUTHERN TOWNS breed insanity. The stagnant air and oppressive mugginess drive their inhabitants crazy. Eccentricities grow into neuroses and simpletons live their empty lives in third floor attics or jilted spinsters spend decades frightening little children who walk on their lawns. In the Harvard Premiere Society's Complex, undergraduate Forrest M. Stone improvises on this theme, turning a modern apartment complex in Alabama into a way-station for a variety of misfits and lunatics.

Stone's disorganized plot banks on a much stronger set of characterizations, resulting in a fairly good script and stage presentation. Complex centers around Cap'm, Andy Birsh, who is also the play's director. Birsh is a lunatic with an endless supply of cash, using apartment D-21 as the setting for his heroic delusions. Like Joseph Conrad's Lord Jim, Birsh imagines himself as constantly in peril; his rantings range from being a beseiged military commander to a revolutionary writer captured by a dictator.

Punk, Paul Redford, serves Birsh admirably as the loyal valet. While Birsh is carrying on with his dreams, which always leave him on the verge of dying, Redford maintains order, paying the rent and buying Kellog's Pop Tarts for breakfast.

Loosely entwined with this plot is the story of the complex's maintenance men, all frustrated losers living in their own imaginations. Ed Redlich plays Tobie, an insecure middle-aged man constantly bickering with Dog, Ron Shmyr, a domineering but pathetically inadequate bullshit artist. The goodnatured foreman, Ed, played by Jeff Horwitz, serves as the mediator, reassuring Redlich and pacifying Shmyr, who feels secure with his electrical degree "from the back of a book of matches."

The play shifts back and forth between these plots, producing several inconsistent scenes. In one of his dreams, Birsh and Bonnie DeLorme are spies meeting in a French cafe, presumably during World War II. Both force their characterizations and leave the audience totally unsatisfied. A meeting between Shmyr and Gary, Peter Reynolds, for whom Shmyr has promised "to score" some dope, again loses its potential effect with clumsy over-acting. Birsh should have struck for a more natural vein.

STONE DEVELOPS the main story dealing with Birsh better than he does the maintenance workers', but the latter plot gains plausibility in the second act. At this point the two stories merge, leaving the audience with a clearer understanding of both. Throughout this development, Stone's characterizations hold the plot together during the weak scenes and elevate it during the stronger ones.

Punk is excellent as the gentleman's gentleman. He remains dignified but servile throughout Complex, skillfully playing the audience with his lines and manner. The interchange between Birsh, who is discussing military strategy, and Reynolds, who is singing football songs, is both comic and forceful. Stone gives Redford another side, however, and shows him to be as frustrated as the rest of the characters, desperately dreaming of taking Birsh's money and letting others serve him.

Redlich starts out somewhat weakly but soon develops into another multi-faceted underling. With the somewhat stock role of the reformed alcoholic who lost his wife to drink and is now "always 20 minutes early to work every day," Redlich convincingly believes in Jesus and still hates all of those around him.

Birsh has by far the most difficult role and he comes up with mixed results. His insane ravings are often touching or comic, but the role is somewhat difficult to maintain. At times he reaches deep pathos and then he degenerates into a take-off of David Frye's Nixon. He has excellent lines with which to work but he still needs to develop a true feeling of what insanity is like.

Over all, the plot troubles and characterizations balance out in the play's favor, and the script's originality gives both a better footing. Though the play is not generally funny it has a few clever lines, especially its closing one. With Tobie and Punk, Stone shows he has an understanding for embittered escapists and just needs to develop and flesh out his ideas. And most of all, he and his cast take up the challenge of the bizarre and emerge' the better for it.