Misery Hates Company

My Sweet Charlie, by David Westheimer. Broadway's racial conscience quickens whenever it pairs a white man and a Negro woman or a Negro man and a white woman to see which combination will lure more customers to the box office. Two seasons ago, the lucky combination was The Owl and the Pussycat, juxtaposing an erudite white bookstore clerk and a hoydenish Negro prostitute. My Sweet Charlie pairs a highly articulate Negro lawyer (Louis Gossett) from the North and a slatternly white mushhead of 17 (Bonnie Bedelia). One after the other, they break into a Gulf Coast cottage in search of refuge. The girl, pregnant and unwed, has been thrown out by her father. The lawyer has killed a white man during a civil rights march.

Misery hates company, or so it seems for most of the play. Full of inbred Southern prejudices, the girl calls the man a "nigger" and won't sit at the kitchen table with him. Full of the critical disdain of the educated, the man sarcastically mocks the girl's looks, grammar, vocabulary and dim wits. Gradually, their plight draws them together, and Playwright Westheimer achieves moments of mirth, poignance, compassion, and interracial rapport.

What enervates a play of this sort is that it lacks any dramatic excuse for existence as soon as one imagines it being played by two white or two Negro partners. It has no bloodstream of its own but siphons its vitality from the headlines of the hour, just as an inert patient is intravenously fed plasma. Furthermore, the fact that two very special kinds of outcasts discover a common bond of humanity is not particularly convincing proof that the bridge of universal brotherhood is easy to build.

The sparks of interaction that fly between proficient Actors Gossett and Bedelia camouflage the dearth of action in the play. Considering that the two hurl abuse at one another for minutes at a time, it is surprising that a playgoer ends the evening feeling that it has been spent with two decidedly likable people.

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