Candide Meets Octopus

By T.E. Kalem

SUGGS

by David Wiltse

Coming to the big city is a kind of initiation rite into the fraternity of adulthood. In a young man's imagination, the metropolis is an enticingly profane glade of Babylonian delights. In reality, the tyro may face a jungle ordeal in which he is savaged by the mightiest beast, the city itself.

That is the gist of a warmly appealing play by David Wiltse. His hero, Suggs (William Atherton), is a Kansan Candide. One of his ideas of what makes New York City the best of all possible worlds is sex. A series of girls (all played by Lee Lawson) parades through his bachelor flat, but a sense of repetitious futility makes him marry a girl (also Lawson) for whom he has no sexual appetite.

Another part of his big-city dream evaporates. He wants to be a network sportscaster but ends up a clerk. His boss advises him to cultivate some sexual deviation if he hopes to succeed in New York. All Suggs can manage is a garden-variety divorce. Then the city moves in on him like an octopus, with one tentacle assaulting him, a second robbing him and a third depositing him babbling on a park bench along with a pair of kooks. This would be as painful as it is abrupt were it not for Playwright Wiltse's engagingly fanciful humor and William Atherton's resiliently ingratiating performance.

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