Theater: Good Grief

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You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown. The U.S. comic strip has often mimicked and miniaturized the battle of the sexes. In Bringing Up Father, the explosively frustrated, cigar-chewing Jiggs is tamed by the shrew Maggie. In Blondie, the hapless, incompetent Dagwood is forever being put to rights by his cool, frizzy-haired wife. In Peanuts, Charles M. Schulz defined and some what disguised the process by finally reducing the American male to his supposedly intrinsic childishness.

The fashionable switch of Peanuts is that good ole Charlie Brown and his friends speak the sophisticated baby babble of the age—popularized psychology. Charlie (Gary Burghoff) has a way of putting himself down before the world does, a sly self-pitying form of oneupmanship. His shrew is Lucy (Reva Rose)—crabby and domineering; another is fussbudget Patty (Karen Johnson). His soul mate is Snoopy (Bill Hinnant), the dog who lies atop the doghouse that Charlie is always in.

Lifted off the newspaper page and on to an off-Broadway stage the boys and girls of Peanuts are only tepidly amusing. The show consists of skits and tag lines from the cartoon series, a revue never more than thimble full. Like Punch and Judy, the characters cannot grow, but merely repeat themselves. There is always something affected about grown men and women pretending to be children and dogs, but this cast manages it with a minimum of annoyance. Peanuts is for devout fans, yes; for theater fun-seekers, no.