Theater: Urban Picaresque

A play is a journey. It can be an outward journey through time, place and action. Or it can be an inner journey through mood, psyche and character. Murray Schisgal's Jimmy Shine attempts an inner journey. The trouble is that it doesn't go anywhere. Jimmy Shine is a transparent character: to see him once is to know him totally. He is a luckless misadventurer, a congenital flunker in the school of life, a born loser with a ready quip for a pick-me-up. Jimmy Shine does not grow, change, or develop, he simply recapitulates himself.

In the fragmented, sketchy way that Schisgal has written it, Jimmy Shine is like a book in which the text has been thrown away and the footnotes published. If it has any style, it might be called urban picaresque. In his Greenwich .Village flat. Jimmy (Dustin Hoffman) stumbles through episodes from his past, present and fantasy lives. Several of the scenes, and Hoffman's part itself, recall his film role as a social dropout in The Graduate. Though the audience never sees him painting, Jimmy is an abstractionist and a dud at it. He is a glutton for humiliation. As "the only abstract painter in the Village who isn't getting laid," he keeps steady dates with a prostitute (Rose Gregorio) who can't refrain from telling him that her other clients are more sat -isfactory in bed than he is.

Jimmy is haunted by girls, wanting them, needing them, losing them. Too shy to propose to the girl he adores (Susan Sullivan), he is crushed when she marries his best friend. Too bold with a girl who cares for him (Pamela Payton-Wright), he affronts her moral code by suggesting sex before marriage. Just to make his humiliations ludicrous as well as painful, he tends to get sudden attacks of diarrhea whenever he is on the verge of going to bed with a woman. Whether in high school or in a San Francisco hippie joint, someone is always splatting an egg in Jimmy's face, which he wipes off with a resilient smile or a song supplied in bouncy measure by John Sebastian of The Lovin' Spoonful.

Vibrant Presence. What makes Jim my more winning than his fate is Dustin Hoffman's bravura performance. It should not be confused with acting. Hoffman does not begin to submerge his identity in the role, which is an essential of great acting. He simply projects the vibrancy of his own presence. He looks the way Buster Keaton may have as a child—and like a child, he loves to show off and mimic. He is so obviously pleased with himself when he apes Groucho Marx's loping stance or speaks with W. C. Fields' adenoidal sneer that it is difficult for anyone in the audience not to be pleased with him. It is the kind of cool, well-finessed stunting with which a clever boy might regale a proud mother. As such, it is always audience-conscious rather than play-and co-player-oriented, the last two again being the marks of a fine actor as opposed to a stage personality.

As far as Jimmy Shine goes, Playwright Schisgal (Luv, The Typist, The Tiger) is very lucky to have Hoffman's ingratiating stage personality working for him. Hoffman takes thimblefuls of humor, absurdity, poignance, honesty, desire and passion and drains them as if they were foaming crystal goblets of dramatic life.