New York on the Sands of Malibu

By T.E. Kalem

THE SUPPORTING CAST by George Furth

The limelight of fame casts its deepest shadow on those who stand next to it. That is Playwright Furth's proposition in this crackling light comedy. In a belated bid for personal visibility, Ellen (Hope Lange) has written an intimately detailed roman `a clef profiling her Pulitzer-prize winning (Presidents and Precedents) novelist husband and a quartet of her best friends.

Instant backlash strikes Ellen. Her unseen husband has barely leafed through the last page when he leaves her and the children in a foul snit. The play's focus and flavor are pinpointed in the first sentence of Ellen's book: "My mother always told me to stick with winners. But if I had, I'd never have met my four friends."

Meet them she does, as do we, in William Ritman's stunningly designed Malibu beach house. Ellen has invited her four friends to lunch, praying that her book will not cause a scene. In common, each is a New Yorker and a supporting cast of one to somebody famous.

The Hatfield and McCoy feud between N.Y. and L.A. is fueled at Broadway's Biltmore Theater by Furth's comic sniper fire. In Director Gene Saks' nimble hands, the characters suffer the gauntlet of Pacific perils from mudslides to brushfires to shudderingly mirthful earthquakes. Furth's people are antic and simpatico. Mae (Betty Garrett) has been an offstage mother to her orchestra conductor son since he first brandished a baton. That he is 40 and a bachelor mortifies her, but not as much as having blurted out on a TV interview that he was not a homosexual.

The kook is Sally. Who else but Sandy Dennis? Sally's Congressman husband ("presidential material") has deserted her for another woman, who, according to Sally, "is as neurotic as I used to be." Coming from a pill-popping vodka swigger, this brings down the house. Dennis' ability to widen her eyes in engrossed shell shock, like a child who has dropped an ice cream cone, and to filter her voice through obdurate adenoids makes her an enduringly dotty delight.

A manicured silver mane crowns Jack Gilford's head, but he tugs an imaginary forelock to his hit playwright wife. As for Joyce Van Patten, endlessly dutiful homemaker to a fabulous screen idol, she scoops up her lines with the hilariously harried rush of a mother on a late laundry run.

Naturally, the four friends wolf into the beastly book before the food, and it gives them premature ptomaine. But soon they are consoling themselves with the memory of an ace dumbo friend named Cleo.

When Cleo heard that a guest was "bringing the bagels" to her dinner party, she set two extra places.

To stomach some of the silly shenanigans in this show, the playgoer should be prepared to do the same. Though Furth licks the platter clean with happy endings, he somewhat blurs his main point.

Ellen's fervent assurance to her four friends is that they nobly serve who merely stand in waiting. But the friends perk up only when they realize that her tattletale bestseller is going to immerse them in autograph-seeking cocktail parties, late-night TV talk shows and curbside genuflections from the unwashed. At last, they too will be glitterati. --By T.E. Kalem

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