The Latent Heterosexual

There are two playwrights inside Paddy Chayefsky -- one is a pixy and the other a preacher. When the pixy handles the pen, it can turn out a funny, wryly perceptive comedy like Marty. When the moral preceptor is in command, the result is likely to be a chalk-dusty lecture like The Passion of Josef D., with its dreary analysis of Stalin's rise to power. Chayefsky's latest work, The Latent Heterosexual, which opened at the Dallas Theater Center last week, is an unsuccessful attempt to weld the two Paddys. But the amusing eye-catcher of a title is only dimly related to the play, which is a symbolic satire on a rather threadbare theme: the materialistic corruption of the U.S. soul.

The hero, John Morley (Zero Mostel) is, by self-definition, "a flaming faggot." He is also a zany, successful author who has never paid his income tax. The I.R.S. has ferreted out his secret, and Morley has been forced to throw himself on the mercy of tax advisers. His chief consultant, Irving Spaatz (Jules Munshin), is a legal weasel of wizardry inventiveness. Munshin plays the role in droll fashion and is astonishingly agile at working his way through a verbal tax maze of inflated gibberish that includes explanations of convertible debentures, spinoffs, and sale-leaseback arrangements.

The first tax advantage nearly fells Morley. Spaatz tells him that it would be economically advisable for him to marry--and the helpful tax man even supplies a woman: the city's leading whore (Chris Richard). Morley is aghast. "To marry a woman would be a betrayal of my identity," he whines as he minces about in an elephantine parody of homosexuality. But marry he does, and he is transformed by Chayefskyean legerdemain into a happy, prospective father. To his considerable grief, the child is stillborn. Meantime, with his tax man spurring him on, Morley has acquired a corporate identity, liens on real estate, a sub rosa connection with the Mafia, a Lichtenstein subsidiary. The erstwhile writer becomes monomaniacally absorbed in profits and tax losses, an attitude that is presumably symbolic of the subversion of art by money.

The progress of the play is really the gradual zombification of Morley as physical debility betokens his psychic decay. He develops a limp, then cannot stand up at all as his arms and legs go rigid. Sitting mutely in a chair as if immobilized by a stroke, he seems to live only with his eyes, which roll in a fine frenzy as his latest financial coups are related to him by the omnipresent Spaatz. The time inevitably comes to get divorced for tax purposes, and then Morley kills himself--for tax purposes. In a final scene of immense sadness and gravity, Mostel performs the rite of hara-kiri with a pair of garden shears. As Japanese music plays offstage, he achieves a remarkable blend of Oriental serenity and intensity, altogether his most memorable theatrical feat since he turned into a rhinoceros in Eugene lonesco's Rhinoceros.

The trouble with Heterosexual is that the play does not rise to its climactic moment but runs down to it like an unwound clock. As comedy, it is fitful; as a social comment, it is fretful, without being particularly penetrating or fresh. Considering how talky the evening is, Burgess Meredith's direction wings it along at a dancing pace with frenetic motion and effervescent, semi-psychedelic lighting. It may be an ironic reflection of the health, resilience and confidence of the U.S. spirit that the play, despite transparent distaste for American capitalism, was supported, promoted, and frequently applauded by an audience liberally sprinkled with Dallas millionaires.

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