Sin and Smog

By T.E. Kalem

LUNCH HOUR by Jean Kerr

It is an odd sensation to be searching for comic relief in a comedy. But certain smoggy patches of Lunch Hour do tend to induce that quest. Possibly the two funniest moments in Act I are Gilda Radner sparring with a spilled pot of coffee and juggling a scalding-hot spoon, and Sam Waterston watching the page proofs of his upcoming book unreel inexorably into a goldfish tank. All of which goes to prove that Director Mike Nichols is still a playwright's best friend.

Jean Kerr's comic touch is slightly anesthetized this time out, but she has not lost it. She couldn't. That would be out of character for the author of Mary, Mary and the droll chronicler of suburban domesticity who regaled us with Please Don't Eat the Daisies and The Snake Has All the Lines. Trust her to keep a civilized, witty tongue in her head whatever her characters' antics. Lunch Hour is a tale of extramarital hanky-panky without the id. Oliver (Sam Waterston) and Nora (Susan Kellermann) have rented the upper half of a Southampton beach house that Designer Oliver Smith must have had in mind for Neiman-Marcus. Oliver is a marriage counselor. He may have counseled his mother and father. Nora is a leggy, braless blond goddess with a slightly crisp manner. She tells Oliver that she is going to visit her mother, but actually she is going to see the Big Bad Wolf.

As if cast up by the tide, an urchin messenger, shod in jogging sneakers, knocks on Oliver's door. This is Carrie (Gilda Radner), a child bride of 22 going on eleven. She heartbrokenly announces that Nora is having an affair with her husband Peter. Peter (David Rasche), a multimillionaire, "is rich for a living," and he must have spied Carrie from his private jet, since he could scarcely have been smitten by her at Polaroid range.

In the inventiveness of despair, Carrie suggests that she and Oliver have a pretend-affair of their own to win their spouses back. The working of the ruse and the very clever denouement are as sacrosanct as the secrets of the confessional and the whodunit.

That does not preclude mention of one glowing scene. Recognizing that a pretend-affair requires some corroborative evidence, Carrie asks Oliver what she is to tell Peter about how it all began. The pair decides that a cozy lunch in one of Manhattan's Upper East Side French restaurants provides the right backdrop for incipient sin.

They occupy an imaginary booth. Oliver begins plying Carrie with sweet talk, and intimacy becomes ardor. Swept away by their playacting, they end the scene clinging and kissing. What is doubly enchanting about this moment is that Jean Kerr has shown us in miniature precisely how the dramatic imagination works, how we as playgoers are carried across the threshold from reality to illusion in the twinkling of a craftsmaster's art.

Lunch Hour might have been better served by a different star. Gilda Radner is referred to as a waif, and tries to mimic scatterbrained vulnerability; but it does not wash. She radiates tensile strength. If she were crossing the Arctic wastes and her Huskies died, she could and would tow the dog sled to the Pole. That invincible force happens to be wrong for this play.

-- By T.E. Kalem

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