Intellectual Twister

Square in the Eye. After exploring the lower depths of drug addiction in The Connection, and splashing a dramatic canvas with jesting surrealistic damnation in The Apple, Playwright Jack Gelber now fires a stream of satirical tracer bullets into contemporary marriage, careerism, the worshipful cults of surgery and psychoanalysis, and the costly cosmeticians of the death industry. Though his mind is finer than his means, Gelber is an intellectual twister and swinger with a phantasmagorial sense of the present.

Story is scarcely the focus of Eye. At the climax, a young wife and mother (Carol Rossen) dies. Before that, her unhappy teacher-husband (Philip Bruns), a Greenwich Village would-be painter, squabbles with her, with his unappetizing children, and with his equally unappetizing in-laws who treat him as an ethnic traitor for not being Jewish. He also covets his best friend's recently divorced wife.

Although Gelber is better at making points than creating people, his concern is with the autotelic personality whose life is as self-contained as a work of art, and who regards all other lives around him as tubes of paint to be squeezed onto his emotional self-portrait. In consequence, the sex battle becomes a war of egos. But Gelber's hero is concerned about being self-concerned, feels guilty about not feeling guilty, and this suffuses the play with moral pathos--even while it is being abrasively funny.

Along the way, Square in the Eye etches a savagely ironic profile of the talkocrats, the people who talk of writing novels and painting pictures, who interminably discuss the problems of home and headline. A theatrical kaleidoscope with film sequences, stills and pop artifacts, Square in the Eye tickles the ribs to stab the brain.

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