PLAYWRIGHTS FOR THE ’90S
Gene Walsh’s Wooff, Wooff, Wooff is the wackiest of the wacky. A young man on a park bench meets a weird old man who insists on sitting in the exact middle of the bench in the middle of the park at midday on the summer solstice. He says he wants to restore his equilibrium. He then calls the young man a dog.
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The dotty ladies in Luzanne Irsheid’s Permanent Address have drunk deep from the well of bittersweetness. These two obsessives deliver separate monologues, sitting near empty mailboxes that presumably symbolize their unmet hopes. One is a life-fearing, borderline mental patient waiting for help from home; the other talks of becoming an astronaut–or of just being “taken,” like Amelia Earhart or Judge Crater. Meanwhile she too waits for the mail. And we wait. Apparently these endearing confessions are supposed to be sufficiently dramatic in themselves. But two slices of bread do not make a sandwich.
An excess of naturalism marks James Serpento’s On the El Nightimes. A black man on the Howard line tries to strike up a conversation with two white passengers, then starts to sense their fear–or worse, indifference. He replaces small talk with harassment; one guy ignores him, the other works himself into a frightened fit. On the El is an actors’ exercise that, though it intriguingly panders to urban paranoia, comes perilously close to playing to audience prejudices.
As if AIDS weren’t agony enough, here’s another throwback to the homophobe’s rationalization–that homosexuals are self-hating, suicidal, and dead-end. Sure, right, they want to die.
