Theater: High-Court Hokum

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FIRST MONDAY IN OCTOBER by Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee

Henry Fonda is one of the very few actors who could dive into this two-inch-deep pool of a play and emerge from it with an Olympic gold medal. A frothy freshet of one-liners does not keep most of this stultifyingly shallow play from being poisonously dull.

There has been a vacancy on the Supreme Court and the Justices are distinctly disconcerted to learn that the President has appointed the first woman ever to become one of the august nine. One Justice, Dan Snow (Henry Fonda), is apoplectic. He is a cantankerous, mountain-climbing liberal maverick not too cunningly modeled on William O. Douglas. He is called "the great dissenter," a rather slippery attempt by Co-Playwrights Lawrence and Lee to shift a characterization that belongs uniquely and unalterably to Oliver Wendell Holmes. The new appointee, Ruth Loomis (Jane Alexander), is a rabid conservative hatched in Orange County, Calif. Naturally, they get into verbal fencing matches but they duel with rubber foils and specious logic.

While the play might be assumed to be profeminist, most of the laughter it arouses in the audience stems from trading on stereotypical masculine prejudices. Viewing an obscene film involving a pornographic film maker, one of the Justices says of Justice Loomis' presence that it is "like having a nun at a stag party."

Count Fonda as a master of masters in precision timing, vocal inflection and revelatory comic gestures. Aside from that, Fonda is part of the nation's memory bank. When he walks on a stage, his footsteps echo with all the roles he has played in theater and films for four decades. Playgoers are not only in his corner; he is indelibly in their hearts. Alexander is not in his league, but neither is her part. To the role of Chief Justice, Larry Gates brings an authoritative gravity of presence. Too bad he cannot dismiss this flimsy dramatic case.