New Play in Manhattan

A Hole in the Head (by Arnold Schulman) possibly originated as a kind of problem play--as something that should tackle the situation of a roughneck Jewish rolling stone left to bring up a twelve-year-old motherless son. That, in any case, is substantially how--after lots of Miami-hotel atmosphere and Jewish-family antics--it concludes: far from anything being straightened out almost nothing in A Hole in the Head has been explored.

Playwright Schulman has really used his situation much less as a problem than as a come-on and a catchall. The father, his Miami hotel foundering, attempts to get a long-distance loan from his rich, crude, stupid New York brother. The brother, accompanied by his warmhearted wife, immediately flies down, immediately flares up--the first of many times--for laughs. His wife expostulates with him, sighs over the boy and wants to take him home with her; she finds a nice widow for the father. The father ditches a blonde for the widow, but at the end he is still unattached, the boy still gallantly at his side.

Playwright Schulman's wayward exploitation, rather than honest marshaling of his material, would matter less were the details, at least, freshly observed and the detours more rewarding. But A Hole in the Head has studied human reactions far too little and audience responses far too much: it goes for its laughs to what has many times been laughed at. and in the very act of milking the comic side of Jewish family life, sadly waters it down. Schulman belongs, in fact, to the two-faucet school of playwriting: what's not comedy is sentiment. And at the end, anything knotty or disconcerting just goes down the drain: Pop may play fast and loose, but he loves his son; Uncle may rant and roar, but he eventually writes out a check. There are amusing enough moments; Garson Kanhvs staging is brisk, and Paul Douglas' father surprisingly believable. But as a new theater form--the problem farce--A Hole in the Head falls decidedly short.

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