Oedipal Farce

A man is given his first birth, but an artist has to earn his second one. So arduous is this struggle, so embedded in a writer's marrow, that he almost always devotes one autobiographical work to it. Playwright Oliver Hailey's Who's Happy Now? may not be autobiographical, but it has the indelible sound of private experience. His play belongs among the most perceptive portrayals of the son-father relationship that have been brought to the stage. Its special quality is that it is an Oedipal farce, zany, effervescently comic and full of as many crazy laughs as a clock has ticks.

The setting and the mood are Saroyanesque, an East Texas small-town bar. The time is the '40s and '50s, as the hero (Ken Kercheval) grows from boyhood to manhood. The father claims that he hates the boy, which is only half true. Not the least of Hailey's sound intuitions is the recognition that love and hate are not opposites but twins. The father is a butcher. He is violent, sentimental, and fiercely masculine. He has kept a one-fisted grip on two women for 20 years, his wife (Teresa Wright) and his mistress, played by Rue McClanahan with giggly glory and flawless timing.

The boy has a talent for song writing, eventually fulfilled, but he tries to become a butcher. He fights his father; yet he wants his father's approval--and deeper still, he wants to be his father. In scenes that are amusing and astute, the son proposes marriage to his father's mistress and later tries to coax his mother into leaving the awful man and coming to live with him.

The funniest scene of the evening is a birthday party for the father, with the ceiling festooned with frankfurters, and a cake shaped like a chopping block. The father vows that he will not touch the cake. Grudgingly, he accepts a piece, bites skeptically into it, whereupon his face unclouds with delight as he discovers that the cake is made of meat. Moments like that are rare in a season, let alone a play, and they make Who's Happy Now? a minor treasure.

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