Juvenilia On Parade

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

TITLE: BLACK COMEDY & WHITE LIARS

AUTHOR: PETER SHAFFER

WHERE: BROADWAY

THE BOTTOM LINE: Little depth is revealed in dated comedies by the author of Equus.

Nothing dates so fast as novelty, and nothing ill becomes a playwright so drastically as having mature peaks contrasted with juvenilia. Thus no one is served, neither writer nor audience, by reviving Peter Shaffer's one-acts about sex, greed and self-deceit. White Liars, the opener, has been rewritten but remains derivative sentimentality about an old East European immigrant barely getting by as a fortune teller on the holiday coast of England. Black Comedy relies on the gimmick of pretending that lights are out when they are on, so people stumble about in unintended sexual tangles while the audience chortles from the superiority of being able to see. It's possible to beguile audiences while amusing oneself with a formal problem -- Alan Ayckbourn does it all the time. But Ayckbourn remembers that comedy derives best from believable characters and situations that arouse empathy. However crowded Shaffer's stage, there's nobody home.

Some major talent is squandered on this intermittently congenial exercise, and the biggest name, four-time Emmy winner Nancy Marchand (Lou Grant), very nearly redeems the event. In the first piece she is the pseudo seer, caked in makeup and swathed in fading Gypsy finery but maintaining an inner core of steely rage. Her climactic revelations, hokey on the page, sound torn from the depths of a great and dangerous soul. She has less to do in Black Comedy, but as a spinster liberated in the dark -- literally -- to indulge dreamy fantasies of booze and sex, she melds exquisite comic timing and gesture with spontaneous sweetness and joy.

Unfortunately, the other star, film actor Peter MacNicol (Sophie's Choice), seems irredeemably phony. That results partly from the writing -- he plays a big-time liar in the first piece, a sculptor equally duplicitous in work and love in the second -- and partly from unconvincing accents and tatty wigs. The big problem is that MacNicol, normally deft and winsome, fails to muster charm. The plays see life through these men's eyes and effectively excuse their sins. MacNicol's romantic devastation in the opening piece suggests peevishness, not agony. His utter ruin in the second piece is so shallowly felt that it arouses far less sympathy than a traffic accident fleetingly glimpsed through a car window.