The Big Apple Turned Over

WHAT WOODY ALLEN brought to the movie, Renata Adler to the novel and Valerie Harper to the sit-com, playwright John Guare has now brought to the stage--that many-headed artistic monster, the Manhattan neurosis. "Bosoms and Neglect," Guare's newest play, is about therapy. It's about loneliness and "5 a.m. friends." It's about the fulminations of intelligent but broken people who are oppressed by the four walls of their Fifth Avenue apartments. Though a bit tired, these themes can usually withstand a warming over, and Guare's is articulate and wry. The trouble comes when he strives higher. As clever urban satire "Bosoms and Neglect" is fine; as probing psychological commentary, it's a flop.

Unfortunately, the play consists mostly of such clumsy commentary. It's got only three characters: Henny (mother), Scooper (son), and Dierdre (bibliophile cum girlfriend). 83 and blind, Henny, has battled breast cancer for two years without anybody catching on--hence bosoms and neglect. Scooper, never too lucky with the girls, was about to run off to Haiti with his best friend's wife when Mom's illness was uncovered. He met Dierdre through their common analyst, Dr. James. In her apartment, while Henny's on the operating table, they spill out their tribulations and prayers. Their idiocyncrasies, it seems, know no bounds; as well as Dr. James, they share an unquenchable thirst for books. They talk in allusion, carry old volumes everywhere, and make love while reciting from yellowed Byron, cut just for the occasion. At least, they're about to, they're about to, when the phone rings. It's Valerie, the girl Scooper's escorting to Haiti.

All of this which takes up about 45 minutes, is funny, But it's abruptly interrupted by Scooper's semi-Oedipal urge to call his ailing mother at Presbyterian. They put him on hold, and at this point he loses it. He hurls the Byron the lovers once caressed about the apartment, with all her precious books. Insanity, it seems, is contagious: she grabs a letter opener and stabs him. From here, the scene changes to the hospital where he and his mother spend an hour and a half rehashing their unimaginative pasts, their guilt, their dreams. He even has a Rosebud--as a baby, his mother used him to cudgel a fellow who rejected her. Hence her numerous suicide attempts; hence her neglect of her cancer.

The main problem with this play is that all three of the characters are so consistently loco that we become dulled by it. There should be a doorman or a maid or something--someone to set off the shrieking and flyings ashtrays. That, or a tauter script. After the play's rambling dialogues, its climactic scene in which Scooper leaves his blind mother talking to a wheelchair while he and Dierdre run off (to Doubleday?) leaves you cold.

Actually, cold is not quite appropriate; queasy is better. There's something unsavory about the actions. All the mental and physical sickness, the frenetic activity, the bestial violence--in fluid drama it might contribute power, but in one that's disjointed and essentially static it's just lurid.

Within the confines of this problematic script, the three actors do not perform poorly. Richard Kavanaugh (Scooper) thrives on the satirical scenes, timing his funniest lines well, and delivering them in a booming baritone that reverbrates about the small theatre. He wears a sardonic frown that embodies his contempt for the culture he lives in. But he acts out his irrational moments less convincingly. The abrupt transition from penthouse humor to breakdown is ungraceful because he tries to express his disorder by physical rampaging rather than verbal interpretation. And the baritone he exploited earlier is over-exercised; like the play's belaboring of psychosis, it soon wears thin.

Lenka Peterson (Henny) succeeds in seeming 83 years old, which, under the garish light of a hospital room, is a feat. She's a forceful character, who makes her son's childlike infatuation with her fairly credible. Henny falters where the script does. She's got too many lines and knows it, so she gropes for a way to enrich her persona. The result is a character who's too self-consciously spunky, reminiscent, at times, of Granny on the Beverly Hillbillies. And when it comes time for that last dramatic soliloquoy, her part collapses altogether.

April Shawhan (Dierdre) is most convincing in her dissolution. Its cause is twofold; a redoubtable father, and a unwieldy imagination. She's pretty but tarnished, a potential alcoholic perhaps, whose zest for discovery is insatiable. Of the three, she best expresses the frailty that foreruns her breakdown. When it comes, it's not an abrupt transition, but rather the natural product of a life of disorder. She alone seems to have grappled with all this before the play's action began.

The onus, then, falls back on the playwright. Commendably, Guare is trying to extend himself. Secure in middle class New York humor, he's reaching for what lies behind it, for what it can evolve into when nurtured by sensitivity and misfortune. He has tried to blend intelligent humor with an Albee-like vision of psychological deterioration and disorientation. Unfortunately, this exceeds his grasp.