Ticker-Tape Blizzard of Fun

You Know I Can't Hear You When the Water's Running, by Robert Anderson, uses sex as a jump rope for four separate playlets, skipping over and over the subject all evening. The result is a trifle obsessive but thoroughly enjoyable.

The first one-acter is almost a Broad way in joke. Since Marat/Sade accustomed audiences to the sight of a man's naked backside, what are the prospects for a frontal confrontation? A deadserious playwright (George Grizzard) with integrity fever wants to stage precisely that. In the opening scene of his play, a man will be offstage in the bathroom brushing his teeth. His wife, in the adjoining bedroom, calls out something. Suddenly the man appears, stark naked, toothbrush in hand, saying, "You know I can't hear you when the water's running." According to the playwright, this will trigger a "shock of recognition" in the audience, penis pity, perhaps.

Anderson's sight gag becomes howlingly funny when the first auditioner (Martin Balsam) appears. Anxious for the part but puzzled by its demands, the actor agrees to become fatter or thinner, remove his toupee, shave his chest--anything. As the real test of his abilities becomes clear to him, he begins to unbutton his shorts with a what-the-hell bravado. But life's little irony is that the playwright has fled, being the sort of man who cannot bear a dirty joke, let alone cast a nude male.

The second and most attenuated of the playlets takes place in the basement showroom of a bedding store, and proves only that Eros is the god of youth and the goad of middle age.

The third sketch striates humor with poignancy. A daughter is going off to college. Her mother (Eileen Heckart), pridefully modern, is anxious to turn the girl into a kind of one-woman prophylactic kit. The husband (Balsam) wants to preserve for his daughter something of the force, excitement and mystery of an intimately loving man-woman encounter. As a man who pledges his word and his heart, he is wounded at playlet's end by a generation that occasionally pledges neither.

Pure zany farce concludes the evening as a senile old couple, rocking-chair riveted and several times married, proceed to confuse spouses, names and places in a marital variation of the old "Who's on first?" routine.

Running would not skim along as effortlessly as it does if the cast did not slalom through the comedy with such dazzling grace. Martin Balsam, in particular, can be wacky, pathetic, puzzled and convulsive in sequence. Whenever Playwright Anderson's comic invention turns paper thin, Director Alan Schneider unfurls it with blinding finesse so that the show remains a ticker-tape blizzard of hilarity.

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