Theater: Bottle Baby

SOME MEN NEED HELP by John Ford Noonan

He looks dead when the curtain goes up; he is only dead drunk. Hudley T. Singleton III, who runs his own public relations firm and is known as Hud, is lying on the floor of his Fairfield County, Conn., kitchen with a two-day stubble of beard and two inches left in a quart of vodka. For reasons that seem stupefyingly apparent, his wife has walked out on him, and he has done what every alcoholic does in a moment of crisis—hit the bottle. But his redemptive godfather is at hand, a most unlikely good Samaritan who rips out the doorknob to make his entrance.

Gaetano Altobelli (Philip Bosco) is an Italian-American ex-Mafioso "collector." Through assiduous upward social mobility, he has risen from his birthplace on Mulberry Street in Manhattan's Little Italy to become Hud's unwelcome neighbor. Gaetano's goodly impulse is to detox Hud: "You don't have to die." But Hud sees it as an intrusion of Wop on Wasp. He hurls endless ethnic slurs at Gaetano. To salvage Hud, Gaetano takes these insults with infinite good grace and gets enough snappers back to make the evening something of a celebrity roast. In the slugfest finale of Act I, Gaetano swings both parts of a refrigerator door at Hud, knocks him cold, puts him in a straitjacket and packs him off to the dry-out sanitarium.

In Act II, Hud returns to a climate of "purposeful change," but it is not that easy to wean a bottle baby, and the moving scenes that follow vividly illustrate W.H. Auden's line, "We must love one another or die." Treat Williams, best known for his work in the film Prince of the City, makes a princely return to the stage. As for Philip Bosco, he is an actor's actor who, in his range, finesse, intelligence and discipline, ennobles his craft.

—T.E.K.