Open Season

By T.E.K.

PASSING GAME by Steve Tesich

Divorce is an amiable mode of parting compared with the way in which the disaffected husbands in Passing Game, now at Manhattan's American Place Theater, hope to end their marriages. Richard (William Atherton) and Henry (Howard E. Rollins Jr.) want their wives to be murdered. To that end, they have rented cottages at a deserted lakefront resort. The reason there are few vacationers around is that some demented killer has declared open season on them. Wishfully, the two men want the phantom murderer to choose their wives for his next rifle fodder. Barring that, the pair make a pact. Richard will shoot Henry's wife Rachel (Novella Nelson), and Henry will dispatch Richard's wife Julie (Margaret Ladd).

Why this venomously plotted vengeance? Both men are onetime promising actors who have had to settle for doing television commercials and voiceovers. As Richard puts it, with his wife dead there will be "nobody to remind me of my potential." Playwright Tesich partially redeems this shaky premise by reminding us that failure is not a private affair in the U.S. It is a public humiliation. By shutting their wives' eyes, the two men hope to shut the world's eyes.

The skillful cast saturates the evening with menace, mockery, melodrama and some one-on-one macho on a night-lit basketball court that brings the two men closer to each other than they have ever been to their wives.

-- T.E.K.

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