How to Half-Die Laughing

Want to win a sure bet? Dare someone not to half-die laughing at Lou Jacobi in a slight but briskly burnished comic nugget of a play called Norman, Is That You?

Sour cream wouldn't melt in Jacobi's mouth, and his face looks like a bowl of stale potato salad. But he wears his troubles like epaulettes, and has he got troubles. He is the owner of a Midwest dry-cleaning establishment, and his wife has just run off with his partner who happens to be his brother. Seeking solace from his New York bachelor son Norman (Martin Huston), Jacobi arrives unannounced (if anything Jacobi does can properly be called unannounced) and finds the boy nonchalantly involved in a homosexual liaison with a friend named Garson (Walter Willison).

To watch Jacobi try to pry this unorthodox couple apart, while simultaneously attempting to cope with the ideas of his wife's infidelity and his son's sexual apostasy, is the chief source of the evening's merriment. Jacobi's erring wife, played by Maureen Stapleton, arrives on the scene, is apprised of events, casts one horrified glance at the floozie Jacobi has imported for remedial therapy, closes her eyes, and bawls the show-stopping title line, "Norman, is that you!"

Director George Abbott, working on his 113th show, paces Norman like a cannonball express, and the humor is solidly grounded in ethos (Jewish), age (middle), attitudes (parental middle-class), and time (U.S.A., 1970). The co-playwrights, Ron Clark and Sam Bobrick, are nimble and abundant gagsters, and while critical snobbism frequently dismisses TV scripters as beneath Broadway contempt, the fact remains that funny is funny.

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