The Theater: Funny Farm

BAD HABITS byTERRENCE McNALLY

Terrence McNally is a sprint man, not a miler. When he attempts a full-length play (Things That Go Bump in the Night; Where Has Tommy Flowers Gone?), his gifts tend to make an embarrassing exeunt. But in the circumscribed province of the one-acter he is rapidly becoming a master.

Bad Habits, his latest miniatures, provide two glimpses of limbo, caparisoned as a sanitarium. In Ravenswood, Dr. Pepper (Paul Benedict), clearly a descendant of the March Hare on both sides of his family, presides over braces of sickies. Among them: a pair of bickering queen homosexuals; an actor and actress, both deeply in love with the full-length mirror; and two middle-aged parvenus who have risen without a trace. Dr. Pepper's loony prescriptions come to have a sense all their own: increased cigarette smoking, high cholesterol diets, tap-dance therapy, internecine squabbles -all are manifestly designed to hasten the end of a few more nuisances. McNally is an angry and some-tunes vicious observer of personality types; this funny farm is liberally mined with terror as well as gags.

Young Transvestite. In Dunelawn, the caricatures grow even broader. Here the healer, Dr. Toynbee, is indeed the March Hare. His patients -a Japanese sadist, a young transvestite and an old lush -are incessantly drugged and straitjacketed; with rabbity gestures, the good doctor counsels them in purest gibberish. To hinder matters, his nurses are starched psychotics, and his grounds keeper is King Kong in a man suit. These are difficult characters to bring off on the page; they are next to impossible on the stage. Fortunately, Director Robert Drivas (a first-rate actor in his spare time) is well aware of Emerson's dictum: "In skating over thin ice, our strength is our speed." His varie gated cast moves with a velocity only slightly tardier than light. The ice may crack, but it never breaks; the wit and venom are rarely interrupted by anything but laughter. In the process, McNally and Drivas have set the pace for the rest of the season. At one point, a nurse (Cynthia Harris) angrily challenges the transvestite (F. Murray Abraham): "Do you know what they call peo ple like you?" "Fashionable." His answer is Off-Broadway immediate: would benefit enormously if that label were to adhere to the good evening of Bad Habits.