Swing Quartet

By T.E.K.

KEY EXCHANGE by Kevin Wade

Three bicyclists zip around the stage of off-Broadway's Orpheum Theater in a play that concerns the nimble revolutions of the heart. Philip (Ben Masters) and Lisa (Brooke Adams) are lovers. As free spirits in the modern kingdom of swing, they do not live together. But Lisa would like to be much less free. When she proposes an exchange of apartment keys, the specter of impending matrimonial claustrophobia chills Philip. Michael (Mark Blum), a chance friend, has a reverse problem. His unseen bride of less than a month has deserted him for a fling with her music teacher.

On successive summer afternoons in Central Park, the plot takes an hourglass turn. Lisa gradually breaks away for an affair with another man, and Philip is amazingly desolated. A night on the town so considerably assuages Michael's grief that when his wife calls up to tell him she is coming home, he is not sure that he wants her back.

Making his playwrighting debut, Kevin Wade, 27, displays a spry, spare way with words. He has a sharp New Yorky eye for character and the ironic vagaries of contemporary man-woman relationships. Key Exchange is tart, funny and tender, with an undertow of the erotic, and the cast is expert and winning.

Spinning as swiftly as a bicycle wheel, Barnet Kellman's direction unerringly maintains the taut tempo of the work. The W.P.A. (Workshop of the Players Art) Theater has brought us, in Wade, a bona fide playwrighting find.

--T.E.K.

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