Theater: The Inhuman Race

But for Whom Charlie, by S. N. Behrman, uses the arena stage of Lincoln Center's Washington Square Theater for a kind of jam session of talk. There are reedy laments of guilt and loneliness, brassy growls of corruption and the low saxophone moans of sex, but the play lacks cohesion, direction and a solid beat.

In Charlie, Behrman is improvising on the theme of "the inhuman race" in a rueful comedy of good, bad and bed manners. The play's hero, Seymour Rosenthal (Jason Robards Jr.), is busy soul-rinsing the filthy millions he inherited from his philistine movie-magnate father. Seymour has established a foundation to give grants to needy and worthy writers. Painfully diffident, Seymour has all but turned the running of the foundation over to an extravert pal from Yale days, self-interested Charles Taney (Ralph Meeker), who would rather down a Scotch than lift a book.

Except for Seymour, all of Charlie's best friends are girls. The woman he really wants is Gilian Prosper (Salome Jens), a sex witch who "ignites without satisfying." None of the love affairs in But for Whom Charlie are particularly satisfying, and it would take a Syntopi-con to cross-reference their capricious complexity. What is satisfying is a foxy grandpa of a one-shot novelist, Brock Dunnaway, wittily played by David Wayne. A gadfly of sanity, Brock mocks the impotent heroes of modern drama, the internationale of homosexuals ("the homintern") and the "moment of truth" cultists.

Charlie mostly puts words in motion without putting believable characters or fresh ideas in significant conflict. True, Seymour is a shy, pure knight of conscience with a 20-20 vision of ethics, and he finally tilts fearlessly with his friend Charlie, but the reversal of roles is too belated to be convincing. The open stage is maddeningly unsuitable for Charlie, so that the drawing-room setting seems perched in a furniture salesroom waiting to be price-tagged for clearance.