Stars and Stripes

SOMEBODY IN the Mudhead Masks acting troupe designs a mean papier-mache horsehead, but he neglected to make sure the horse's socks matched. As a result, Dan Rice's Wife Maggie's Incredible Educated Horse, as it capers about reading the hour off Dan's gold watch, displays a pair of red socks, a pair of lavender, and a pair of polka-dot. Not exactly your prime specimen of pre-Civil War humor.

On the other hand, good pre-Civil War agrarian humor is hard to come by these days, and spectators would do well to appreciate the specimens in One Horse Show, as much for their genuine bellyachin' humor as for the lost world they recreate. Dan Rice, the homespun clown who dressed up in a flag suit and ultimately inspired the cartoon image of Uncle Sam, peddled a brand of entertainment which--as the show gradually reveals--was virtually extinct by the time of Appomattox. In his heyday--set forth in the show's early vignettes--Rice would cavort while telling his audiences morality stories (each with a twist), browbeat them with "verbatim" scenes from Hamlet and Othello and frequently harangue them about politics. With a freewheeling didacticism few audiences today would gravitate to for entertainment, he lengthily described the benefits he had gained in youth by regularly "fertilizing" himself in a barrel of horse manure, and he generously passed on his father's Irish fables in a luxuriantly funny brogue.

If you don't like this kind of thing you'll probably be mightily bored with One Horse Show. It is a tninly plotted string of gags and faceoffs tracing Rice's life and times, the progression and corruption of his are through vaudeville elements, his debilitating competition with the evil Dr. Paradisio, and the disfavor that came with more "modern" times and from which he was lifted by a political cartoonist who saw in his comical flag-garbed figure the embodiment of the American spirit. The Mudhead Masks, a Cambridge based troupe, are clearly adopt at the kind of fluid hijinks and simple, obvious laugh grabbers that keep this stuff bouncing along, and David Zucker, as Dan, is a superb enough clown to carry the evening singlehandedly, much as the old entertainer might have done. His command of face and voice and body are spellbinding enough to focus the silliness. When he is on stage you can forget to wonder what was so interesting about Dan Rice or why all those people are doing these odd things with so little logical excuse all around him.

But Zucker does, after all, occasionally have to go offstage to take a breather. Why does that silly papier-mache horsehead keep bounding up to the audience? Why is one fellow sitting on a straw-stack on the edge of the stage, strumming an unidentifiable instrument and looking so mellow that spectators two rows back started betting on when he would fall asleep? Why does Dr. Paradisio (Tamara Jenkins) keep screaming at both real and imaginary audiences about the healing powers of ga-a-a-a-arglin' oil? Why on earth does one actress spend a full half-hour up on a trapeze twenty feet up, dressed as the flying Columbia and looking absolutely positive she is going to fall down?

WELL, WHY the hell not? They're having fun, and writer and director Ron Jenkins seems to think the story of Dan Rice says something significant about American history or the American spirit. Maybe it does, but it's difficult to take the statement seriously in this format, just as it's difficult to get reflective about a horse whose eyelashes are that long and whose socks don't match, even if it can read gold watches. Anyone who tries to engage in thoughtful evaluation of the material before him is likely to be rudely interrupted by Dan himself, sauntering up the aisle, patting his shoulder, and demanding, "Now your, sir--you're a blacksmith with only one apprentice, and your work doesn't suffer, does it?"

Flashes of outright seriousness do surface from time to time, but they slip away too quickly to allow a firm grip--which is very likely all for the best. Dan Rice, from all accounts, was a sunbeam; by the play's end he is already half sunk in twilight, dimmed by the onslaught of "modern contrivances" and the newborn industrial mentality. Try to portray a sunbeam a hundred and twenty years later and you may get a gleam of warmth: some charming laughs, perhaps; and, in the end, a confused sense of pleasure and a done of genuine perplexity as to where it came from.