Sunny Kooks

By T.E. Kalem

TABLE SETTINGS by James Lapine

The wacky family comedy has proved a durable delight in the U.S. theater.

Among the more notable items on that roster: You Can't Take It with You, The Royal Family (about the Barrymores), The Impossible Years and the long-running Broadway hit Gemini. A play like The Man Who Came to Dinner is very closely related to this genre. What links them all together is a zany brand of eccentricity, an inebriation of the mind and spirit rather than the body.

Table Settings is a modest but thoroughly engaging entry in this category of the lovable kooks en famille. All the action takes place around dinner tables. While the characters do relatively little eating, they sure do spill the beans. The basic ethnic unit and the flavor of the humor are New York Jewish. The play is being presented at Manhattan's off-Broadway Playwrights Horizons Theater.

The clan is trigenerational. Mother (Frances Chancy) is a widow who was born in Minsk. To her the past is a golden pillar of stability, while the present is a baffling disarray of odd behavior. What mutational deviation of personality can possibly prevent her broodlings from devouring their food when she orders them to charge with drawn forks?

"Money Is Freedom" seems to have been engraved on the family crest in Minsk. The older son (Brent Spiner), a lawyer, is making a boodle. He is also spending rather freely on double martinis in rapid sequence, and he smokes in chains. He later switches to jogging, a decision of grave dubiety. What he cannot seem to do is get his nose out of a book or newspaper to pay some loving concern to his Gentile wife (Chris Weatherhead) or provide some fatherly guidance to their two children. This pair, a nine-year-old boy (Eric Gurry) and his 13-year-old sister (Marta Kober) are quintessential snots with IQs high enough to float off the charts. Two more tasty noodles are dropped into this comedic chicken broth.

The lawyer's younger brother (Mark Blum) is an unemployment fetishist with a yen for pot, coke and sex. His girlfriend (Carolyn Hurlburt) does mental-rehabilitation work and seems to be indesper ate need of it herself.

Playwright Lapine writes amusing lines. At one point the mother asks the younger son why he doesn't get a job. An immigrant matriarch, her next question is pencil-point sharp: "Why did you go to college?" His riposte: "To avoid being asked questions like this after high school." One of the distinctly appealing aspects of Table Settings is its benign ami ability. Even when Lapine's characters verge on cartoons, he presents them as en dearingly human in their follies, desires and genetically nutty ways. His direction of his own play is brisk, and his cast is close to flawless. A special huzzah should be raised to the two kids, who manage the rare stage feat of being obnoxious and adorable at the same time. -- T.E. Kalem

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