Transient Souls

By T.E. Kalem

THE HOT L BALTIMORE by LANFORD WILSON

The American eccentric is no stranger to the U.S. stage. One thinks of such plays as The Time of Your Life, You Can't Take It with You and Harvey. The characters in those plays are part rebel and part kook, social dropouts, sort of sacred nuts. The tradition deepens in the works of playwrights like William Inge and Tennessee Williams. Their characters are not so much oddballs as odd souls who suffer psychic and sexual wounds. This is the world of the alienated self, the mutilated heart, the existential transient, moving a playgoer more nearly to tears than to laughter.

Lanford Wilson, 37, clearly hopes to be a dramatist of this latter school, but at present he lacks the specific gravity for it. He is more akin to the Saroyan who wrote lines like "I don't suppose you ever fell in love with a midget weighing 39 pounds?" He is also prey to Saroyan's easy sentimentality and that boozy euphoria that permits Saroyan's characters to bite on the nail of life and declare it to be a nougat.

The inhabitants of THE HOT L BALTIMORE are transients, and so is their habitat. The E has dropped from the fac,ade of the Hotel Baltimore, and the wreckers' ball awaits this seedy relic of past elegance. The lobby is a kind of limbo where the remaining tenants relate or display their past falls from grace. In The Time of Your Life, Saroyan gave us one whore with a heart of gold, the luminous Kitty Duval. Wilson is no piker. He gives us three: Martha (Trish Hawkins), April (Conchata Ferrell) and Suzy (Stephanie Gordon). Martha is a lost, innocent child, April her caustic Eve Arden-type sidekick, and Suzy the dumb one. It testifies to the durability of the goodhearted-prostitute cliche that audiences can still buy it.

The other characters in the hotel lobby also have names, but they might as well have labels. There is the Lady in Genteel Decline. Instead of sherry, she sips memories of the days when the hotel was grand and the world young. There is the Crusty Old Geezer. He has lost most of his marbles, but is testily ad amant about the rules of checkers. There is the Boy in Quest of Identity, who is trying to track down a missing grandfather. And good for more than a few laughs is the Health-Food Evangelist, played by Mari Gorman with the abrasive tongue and cocked shoulders of a Marine sergeant.

With virtually no plot line, these characters must carry the burden of Wilson's meaning, again more succinctly stated by Saroyan: "No foundation. All the way down the line." The same might be said for much of Wilson's play; it is most fascinating as a symptom. Why do U.S. playwrights and audiences regard derelicts as exotic romantics? Why should the dregs of society be regarded as the ultimate repositories of its wisdom? Why is a kinky personality presumed to be a rich one? And finally, how much of theatergoing has become a jaded form of slumming in which the middle-class playgoer gawks and laughs at perverse creatures whom he would studiously skirt on the streets? "I.E. Kalem

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