Juvenilia in a Fright Wig

And Things That Go Bump in the Night. Terrence McNally, 26, had better beware of moths, for his mind is pure wool. The thoughts of this playwriting youth are the fashionably wrong wrong thoughts about Nuclear Apocalypse, the Bitch Mother, the Castrated Male, the Homosexual Martyr, and the Dehumanization of Everyone. The result is one of those off-bleat stupefactions that make the modern stage look like the queerest wing of a nuthouse.

The setting is an underground shelter fitted with intercoms and tape recorders and guarded by an electrified fence that dims the light whenever a stray animal is electrocuted. A family is hiding here from an unspecified "it" that is "moving west." Mother Eileen Heckart mangles French and Italian phrases and listens raptly to off-key recordings of her opera-diva days. She is a Venus's-fly-trap who has devoured "Fa" (he is too contemptible to deserve the other syllable) and dragooned Daughter Lakme (Susan Anspach) and Son Sigfrid (Robert Drivas) into performing strange little rituals like strewing the air with paper petals and striking heraldic poses with Wagnerian swords.

This nihilistic trio proceeds to torment and destroy Sigfrid's guest-for-the-night, a gentle deviate dressed in a dress. Of course, the playwright is not going to let this poor fellow immolate himself on the fence without giving the audience his maudlin credo: "Shakespeare, Florence [the city in Italy], someone in the park. That's what I believe in." Alert the park department!

This piece of juvenilia was directed by Michael Cacoyannis, who has done better (in The Trojan Women, Zorba the Greek) and knows better. The play's plot and characters are assembled from the Kopit-Albee playmaking kit. Bump's grandfather is the peppery and frustrated duplicate of the grandmother in Edward Albee's The Sandbox. The silent father is a variation on Albee's laconic, spiritless father in The American Dream. Mother is the voracious woman of Arthur Kopit's Oh Dad, Poor Dad, in fright wigs a la Tiny Alice. Lakme wears the little-girl dresses that the sex-hungry baby sitter wore in Oh Dad; Sigfrid half chokes her to death, as the boy in that play strangled the baby sitter. And the mortal baiting of the homosexual in Bump follows the cruelly bantering tone and logic of the venomous get-the-guests game in Virginia Woolf. The effect is worse than theatrical incest: it is rather like spreading disease in the guise of curing corruption.

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