Theater: Shell Game

The Egg (by Félicien Marceau) is a French sex farce with more head than bed in it, though on Broadway it tries to keep grinning from leer to leer.

The play's hero, Emile Magis (Dick Shawn), is poor, wistful and young, and he yearns to crack the shell of "the egg," as he calls middle-class society. If he can live up to the rules of "the system," Emile reasons, he will stop being an outsider. The rules to him are the clichés people are always mouthing, such as, "He got up as fresh as a daisy." Emile wakes up worn out and achy. When it comes to girls a man who knows the system is able to say, "I said, 'My place?' and she said, 'Why not?' " It takes Emile three years to get a woman up to his place. The education of Emile continues in episodic vaudeville skits, and the hero gradually realizes that the system has no logic. When it fails, "you have to lie," he discovers. All is chance and absurdity.

For a time, Emile enjoys a mindlessly sensual affair with a married woman (Janet Ward). But the lure of the egg is too strong. He marries a bureaucrat's daughter and becomes a civil servant. When his wife is unfaithful, Emile turns venal and takes money from her lover "for the entertainment." Fearful that the pair might kill him, Emile murders his wife with the lover's revolver. In a hilarious scene of courtroom parody, the lover is sentenced to a 20-year jail term, and Emile yelps gleefully to the audience "That's the system!"

The Egg has been directed for its racy blue lines rather than its wry black comedy theme. Dick Shawn is miscast as Emile. He is funny, versatile and energetic, but he lacks what the role most needs—lack of confidence. The world is

Shawn's oyster rather than an uncrackable egg. The shiver of terror that should accompany the transformation of the timidest soul into the tawdriest heel is thus lost. In scenes of inane family cackle, and in the spectacle of a cuckolded husband applauding his wife flagrante delicto ("Congratulations, Heloise. You're getting better every time"), Playwright Marceau approaches the existential nausea toward life that animates the "theater of the absurd" (TIME, Dec. 22). Sartre and Camus have obviously influenced Marceau, but the guiding philosophy behind Broadway's Egg seems to be Minsky's.