Filling the Vacuum

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

THE PRIMARY ENGLISH CLASS

by ISRAEL HOROVITZ

The situation is pure H-Y-M-A-N KAPLAN, but its development is impure MASH. It is the first night of a course designed to give recent immigrants a nodding acquaintance with their new language. Out of the melting pot and into an empty classroom drip a Frenchman, an Italian, a German and two Oriental women, none of whom has any language in common with the others. Nor, it turns out, does their late-arriving teacher, Debbie Wastba (Diane Keaton), have anything but pantomime and a feverish determination to fall back upon as she goes about her unfamiliar duties (she is certified as an instructor in business administration).

Simultaneous translation keeps the audience in the picture and, for a few minutes, the show has interesting promise. Very shortly, however, it becomes clear that Playwright Horovitz has only one sort of joke in mind--a set of variations on the old Tower of Babel gag --and that Director Edward Berkeley can think of only one way to play it --stridently.

It is Keaton who keeps the evening a-Eve. As she has demonstrated in several Woody Allen movies, she is wonderfully attuned to the nuances of neuroticism as it exists in a certain type of young American woman. Allen movies, however, are not vacuums that need filling, and so she has never had the opportunity for the full-throated, full-throttle exploration of an uptight woman trying desperately not to show her true colors.

There are, in her performance, at least half a dozen Debbies: a falsely easy-mannered hipster, a stern elementary school disciplinarian, a sexual paranoiac (she is convinced the school janitor is a rapist), a multiprejudiced xenophobe, a cruelly playful child and, finally, a vulnerable woman. Keaton can expose all these creatures in a single whirling moment. She cannot save the show, but she has definitely announced her ability to stand independent of Allen as a delightful comic force to be reckoned with.

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