Theater: Genius, Menace and Chicanery

From three gifted playwrights, the topics and blessings are mixed

LAUGHING STOCK

It must have occurred to everyone who has ever tried to teach a course in creative writing: What would happen if an authentic genius somehow stumbled into class? But it is Romulus Linney who has finally done something wonderful with the notion. In P.M., the masterly miniature that is the centerpiece in this evening of one-acters off-Broadway, he places at one end of the seminar table a prim-looking teacher (Frances Sternhagen) whose lack of success as a novelist has not yet sapped her idealism. At the other end sits Bufford Bullough (Leon Russom). Bufford looks like Thomas Wolfe, writes like William Faulkner and carries around with him in a cardboard box the burden of his dreams: a thousand-page manuscript and a bottle of booze. It is hard to say whether the other students (Peggity Price, Jane Connell) are more appalled by the erotic spew of language in Bufford's work or by the way their teacher reaches across the barriers of age, sex and class to acknowledge the right of great gifts to wrap themselves in socially unappetizing forms. What one can say is that her act of commitment to another committed writer turns rich comic turmoil into touching drama.

At 53 still one of the American theater's most mysteriously buried treasures, Linney, who also teaches writing, is obviously speaking from the heart here. Laughing Stock's other short plays are slighter: an anecdote about death and telephones and a shaggy-dog story about an old woman's discovery that her 70-year marriage was founded on a sly joke. But they too are marked by Linney's singular talent for stating wild ideas with high, simplifying intelligence and for drawing deft portraits of the half mad in which not a line is misplaced or wasted.

—By Richard Schickel

OTHER PLACES

The dialogues in a Harold Pinter play are pitched battles between speech and silence. The speaker marshals all the resources of colloquial language—wit, wheedling, anecdote, abuse—while the listener waits out his opponent and, often as not, wins the battle by withholding approval, by being as silent as God. Such, too, is the uneasy symbiosis of Playwright Pinter and his audience. In these three short plays that Alan Schneider has mounted off-Broadway (two of them first performed at London's National Theater in 1982, the third earlier this year), Pinter dramatizes this relationship through three memorable audience surrogates, each a displaced person from an intellectual twilight zone.

Victoria Station, the opening skit, is an edgy conversation between a perplexed London taxi-fleet dispatcher and a maddeningly vague, or vaguely mad, cab driver (Kevin Conway). One for the Road, set in an unidentified police state, offers the horrific spectacle of the torturer as business executive, bantering with his victims as he sends them off to be flogged, raped or killed. In A Kind of Alaska, a middle-aged woman (Dianne Wiest) awakes from a 29-year siege of sleeping sickness to confront a reality at pathetic odds with her memories and hallucinations. Dispatcher, torture victim, woman, all struggle valiantly to understand a new world of menacing mystery.