ONLY KIDDING
The important thing in a joke isn’t the punch line, a middle-aged comedian advises a young writer in Jim Geoghan’s play Only Kidding. The important thing is the setup. It’s a point well proved by Geoghan in his punchy portrait of life in the cutthroat world of stand-up. There’s hardly a new joke to be found in Geoghan’s script, a virtually nonstop procession of borscht-belt patter, coarse insults, physical clowning lifted from old Marx Brothers and Three Stooges movies, and stereotyped, frequently obscene slurs against Poles, Italians, Greeks, the British, women, homosexuals, and the elderly. There’s even a variation on the old Ikey-and-Mikey burlesque routines in one of the play’s crucial relationships, the friendship between two members of a comedy team, a Jew and an Irishman. And the final, inevitable burst of slapstick violence comes straight out of old Bugs Bunny and Tweetie-and-Sylvester cartoons, evoked by the delicious movie music used to underscore the action–all smirking flutes and squeaking fiddles and shrieking trumpets and scrambling percussion. But the way Geoghan sets up this casebook collection and the warmth with which Wisdom Bridge’s midwest premiere of the script is played make for a very enjoyable study of the craft.
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Jackie Dwayne is an aging monologuist of the Shecky Greene/Don Rickles variety trying to make a comeback following a heart attack. Jerry Goldstein, a coke-snorting Young Turk whose specialty is retrofitting old-style humor for today’s post-rock-and-roll audiences, is just starting to make a name for himself in New Jersey lounges as a warm-up act for singers with names like Joey Vee and Johnny Ventura. The two Jewish jokesters come from different eras (as Jerry notes when he sneers at Jackie’s assimilationist stage name), but they have a common goal: to get on the Buddy King Show, a televised talk and variety hour that can make or break a performer with a single spot.
That sense of experience is fatally lacking in the Synergy Theatre Company’s mounting of the play. Set designers Richard and Jacqueline Penrod have built a hotel terrace that’s at once practical and poetically evocative, but it’s not inhabited by the people Williams envisioned. The actors are all too young for their roles–not just in their appearances but in the amount of experience they bring to the text. Catherine Martineau, an agile and attractive young actress, is particularly ill-suited to the hefty, aging earth mother Maxine; Pamela Webster comes off the best as Hannah, because she has found the right tone of voice for the part–elegant and emotionally repressed–but it’s too superficial to register the terror that Hannah hides behind her facade. Lawrence Bull’s Shannon is more petulant than desperate; and Dale Young is bizarrely soft-spoken as Nonno, making the old poet’s declamation of his last poem–the thematic statement of the whole play–impossible to understand even in the intimate Synergy Center. Williams’s exquisite play, too seldom produced, is disappointing here.
