Saran-Wrapped Social Security

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

Not so very long ago, Broadway was thickly settled with relentlessly cheerful domestic comedies. Almost invariably these plays were set in some showcase living room. As soon as the curtain went up, audiences applauded the unassertive furniture, as if in affirmation of their own good taste. That kind of play is all but dead, killed by high ticket prices that prompt theatergoers to demand something special, and by the genre's own dishonesty. When a TV sitcom resolves an impossible problem in half an hour, viewers know that more trouble will crop up next week. In the theatrical equivalent, pain is glibly and permanently cured by the final curtain.

Still, every season someone attempts to revive the form. This year's example is Social Security, the bawdy but bland story of a Manhattan art dealer (Marlo Thomas), her suburban sister (Joanna Gleason), their respective husbands (Ron Silver and Kenneth Welsh) and the aged mother who drives them crazy (Olympia Dukakis). Playwright Andrew Bergman has written lustily funny movies (Blazing Saddles, Fletch), but he places only ticktock jokework on the stage. Worse, he creates situations of real pathos and then anesthetizes them. The matriarch is 80, unable to get around without a walker, unwilling to be left alone for an hour. By the play's end, this coarse, undereducated widow of a house painter has won the heart of a 98-year-old superstar artist (Stefan Schnabel) reminiscent of Marc Chagall and has thereby healed her ailments.

Unseen but much discussed is the suburban couple's daughter, a college freshman who has stopped attending class to provide round-the-clock sexual service to two men. The girl's relatives fatuously assure one another that her self-abasing behavior is a phase she will outgrow. In another subplot, the girl's parents consider divorce, but the audience cannot see the agony they profess to feel. The entire proceedings, staged by Mike Nichols, are life as viewed through Saran Wrap. Although Broadway Veteran Nichols has mislaid his gift for telling detail, he has evoked maximum slickness and verve.

There are the makings of a play in the resentment between the housewife, who nurses the mother, and her sister, whose answer to everything is writing a check. But Bergman settles for stale attempts at satire about city dwellers vs. suburbanites, trendy vs. square relations, rich vs. poor ones. The actors struggle to give the play life, but there is only one moment of insight. As Thomas' ever irreverent husband, Silver says, "I'm flip, which is another way of being shy." Perhaps that is Bergman's problem, and it is surely the problem of a weary genre: plenty of wisecracks but not much wisdom. W.A.H. III