Cosmic Jokers

By T.E.K.

There is a group of relatively new playwrights who might, if they chose, call themselves Pagliacci Incorporated. They are terribly blue about U.S. values and the state of the universe, but they clown around and tell lots of jokes, some of them quite funny, to soothe their philosophically broken hearts. They are seventh-rate Schopenhauers posing as third-rate Neil Simons.

A leading member of this crew is Israel Horovitz, who wrote The Indian Wants The Bronx, and now Line. Other playwrights with a similar tenor of mind are John Guare (CopOut, The House of Blue Leaves), Kurt Vonnegut Jr. (Happy Birthday, Wanda June), and Jules Feiffer (Little Murders, The White House Murder Case). In a sense, they are all cartoonists (as Feiffer actually is), commenting on life, but never really bringing life to birth on the stage. They all write rather like Madison Avenue dropouts, reaching for the zingy zany line that will somehow sell their intrinsically pessimistic little packages. They are all loaded with urban chic. For these cosmic jokers, Manhattan is the cosmos.

Line is a typical example, for it is a symbolic spelling-out of the big-city rat race. Four men and a woman stand in a line for some undisclosed event, and each one wants to be first. By trickery, by cajolery, by avarice, by lechery, by pure New Yorky pushing and shoving, each, in turn, supplants the other at the head of the line. It is rather like a stand-up game of musical chairs, and though it has a goodly quota of laughs, it goes on too long for what it is.

Horovitz, like his fellow members of Pagliacci Incorporated, always seems on the verge of saying something of size and substance but never gets past the verge. When a playwright says nothing that is fresh, deep, strange, poetic or startling about the business of being human, the frustrating irrelevance of the evening seems to cancel out the apparent signs of theatrical promise. Indeed, a shrine might be erected to all of these fledgling dramatists, and their patron saint would be Our Lady of Perpetual Promise.

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