CELEBRITY BEAT
And if you’re Cheryl Lavin, you plan a bitchy little jeu a clef about the backbiting, ethics-bending world of celebrity journalism–only to find yourself producing a two-act testament to your ambivalence, your extreme ambivalence, your extreme but inchoate ambivalence over your own role in that world.
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Now what’s happened here? Two things. Thing one is that Molly’s achieved considerable prominence in her field. More than that, she’s achieved happiness: the choice of a phone chat with her boyfriend over a conversation with Bush is meant to suggest that she’s really, truly, honestly got it all now; her head’s together and her priorities are straight, and she can afford to enjoy the simple pleasures she neglected so badly during her Mildred Pierce phase.
Lavin never deals with this dilemma, even though it’s the single most compelling thing about an otherwise negligible comedy. Like Jerry Sterner and Shelley Berman, she’s too caught up in the contradictions of her subject even to recognize it as her subject. She can’t afford to let herself know what her play’s about because doing so would bring the fantasy down around her ears. Which might, in turn, bring other things down around her ears. Play therapy’s a risky business.
