Legal Complications

IT WAS a bit surrealistic. Boy meets girl. Boy loses girl. Boy invests in mutual funds.

The joke is hardly funny, but this is the sort of humor the Law School Show peddles. A group of law students, most in their third year, take time off from their legal studies to write, direct, and stage a musical comedy for their classmates. Outsiders will find many parts of the show entertaining, but there is nothing inherently witty in the references to casebooks and legal Latin, which get so many guffaws from the in-house crowd. The show exploits little more than the nervous excitement generated by those drawn away from their study cells and their own casebooks. They laugh at anything, let alone an occasional joke with a point to it.

Even the title. Contempt of Courtship, shows the effort to squeeze humor from the legal jargon that revolves around the real lives of the show's performers and producers. The formula obviously works for the many law students in attendance, who can laugh at themselves through the sundry charicatures of life at the nation's most prestigious law school.

THE PLOT purveys the different ideals and ambitions lifestyles and ideologies that are no doubt common to law students everywhere, and perhaps magnified at Harvard. A Langdell tunnel map, which serves as the backdrop for several scenes, points the direction to Wall Street as well as to the cafeteria. One of the show's subplots involves the quarrels between the aspiring lady capitalist of the 1980s and her boyfriend, a self-styled Che Guevara--ever-ready to spout bleeding heart liberalism and Marxist structuralist dogma.

But, as always in such productions, the major theme is love. Those of us who will never be able to introduce ourselves as Harvard Law students are reminded that they too are human. We observe the self-effacing foolery of a 3L with an almost litigious inability to communicate his desires to the women he finds attractive, the oh-so-sad dilemma of a voluptuous female law student who can not escape her retinue of pining creeps, and the pitiful machinations of Irving deWurmme, a fat and dirty slob who drools over the opposite sex from behind his text books.

The performance is, for the most part, delightfully amateurish. After all, the Law School teaches a professionalism of a different kind. The only standout among this cast of legal eagles is Bruce Grossberg, as Irving the nerd. Yet, the company's two large chorus numbers display the sort of spirit and energy that might make us re-think the popular conception of the lawyer's personality.

TOO TIRED to Boogie," a lengthy disco scene, radiates the pathos and misfortune of academic types seeking to relieve their boredom in the foreign environment of strobe lights and glass balls. In contrast, a '50s bobby-socks mock-up allows the singers and dancers to wail over the alienation of their social life by oppressive education appeal to the audience as reminders of the elite status that three years at the Law School provide to those who choose to undergo whatever social barbarism it imposes. The show's authors depict the painstaking process of interviewing with corporate law firms, an experience familiar to most third-year students and anticipated with relish by a great number in their first. The several condescending references to the Yale law school--one would have been enough--show the performers' academic commitments. They tell us that "Law School ain't no place to be in love," and how "This legal tutoring is really neutoring." Even if we are not reduced to sorrow over their plight, these lyrics, along with the trials and tribulations depicted in the script, afford the law students copious opportunity to wallow in self-pity.

But the lameftation cannot obscure the blatantly self-adulatory tone that pervades the production. Incessant references to the paraphernalia of a legal disdain for those who do not fit into their moid.

Indeed, the inside jokes and the conviviality of the production speak for its intimate appeal to its audience. A credo emerges that seems to say, "Our music might be bland and our acting may not be stellar, but we still think we're some of the most important people of our generation." The show's program lists the setting as an obscure Eastern law school, but the fact that it takes place at Harvard has a lot to do with this attitude. The vast majority of the people in this country only know Harvard as the Law School, and its graduates are accorded the esteem that only truly singular achievment can surpass. The show should be kept in perspective for what it is, a group of people getting together to have a good time. But a narcissistic effort of an elite to distinguish itself should be perceived also.