APRIL SNOW
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April Snow focuses on romantic travails among the New York literary set, and aims at the piquant, bittersweet kind of screwball comedy we associate with Noel Coward. Gordon Tate, a 61-year-old writer–four times married, four times divorced–is on the brink of a new affair with 20-year-old Millicent, who is just recovering from a mental breakdown. Grady, Gordon’s ex-wife and a lesbian, warns Gordon against getting involved with someone so young and unstable, and then proceeds to moan about her own ongoing problems with a young, unstable lover. After a brief late-night encounter with a trio of “killer fruits”–the sort of social-climbing dilettantes who populate the pages of Andy Warhol’s diary–Gordon realizes that while he can’t live with Millicent or Grady, he can’t live without ’em, either; the three come up with their own design for living as the lights dim.
In Can-Can, the evening’s very brief curtain raiser, Linney is concerned with the lives of more ordinary folk. The play, presented as a chamber reading with the actors sitting on stools, is a quartet of interlocking monologues spoken by two couples: a southern GI and his French girlfriend, and a middle-class housewife and the rural southern woman who entices her into an extramarital affair. The stories of how the lovers meet, mate, and separate are told in tandem, as Linney constructs the speeches like four interweaving melodies in a string quartet.
