Hiphazard Happening

One evening last week Actor Jerry Schultz, 35, flopped down on a couch, stretched, yawned and fell asleep.

It was the ultimate in Method acting, for at the time, he happened to be onstage in a new off-off-Broadway drama called Life with the Family, and playing the toughest role of his career: being himself. Schultz believes that real eating-talking-sleeping life has all "the pathos, humor and drama of the theater." To prove it, three weeks ago he and his sons Lyle, 4, and Elan, 5, a jazz musician named Marzette, 28, and three dogs and a cat set up house on the stage of the Headquarters theater in Manhattan's East Village--and invited the public to drop in at any hour of the day or night (tickets: 50-c- to $1).

So far, playing to audiences of 20 to 200 daily, the "live-in" has been a series of haphazard happenings--arguments, jam sessions, talkathons--as well as plain old views of the Schultz family eating, watching TV, reading, and chatting on the telephone. As theater, Life is worth leaving; as peep show, it is an offbeat, sometimes curiously intriguing look at the denizens of bohemia caged, as it were, in their natural habitat. Among their most pressing problems are housekeeping and housebreaking the dogs. Just when things might get interesting, the mutts have the distressing habit of upstaging the cast by urinating on the floor.

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