486
MARTIN DUBERMAN
Unfortunately, Kevin O'Connor, an actor who has always enjoyed far
better reviews than he deserved, had the central role and failed to take
advantage of its many possibilities.
For the first half of
Boy,
Tavel's marvelous facility, his barbed
mockeries,
his
refusal to take seriously anything but private fantasy ("I
feel compassion." "Why?" "It's a warm, sweet feeling."), make for a
great deal of elaborate fun. And also for considerable disquiet. By juxta–
posing sentimentality and brutality ("Lovely Mary's" mother describes
her daughter's "sweet" graduation dress just as Mary, having been
bludgeoned to death,
is
being buried by her slayers), Tavel compellingly
demonstrates the horrors of our national mentality, at once bathetic
and sadistic.
But Tavel trades too long and relies too heavily on word-play. By
the second
half
of
Boy,
as his invention flags, he falls back on mere
technique, especially the tiresome trick of picking up a word from one
line and using it to invent the next ("Take stock in what I say." "There's
talk about them stock piles again."). Too much of the second part
of
Boy
is tired parody ("let's war to end all wars") and third-rate
punning (like referring to the character "Bad Butch" as "a son of a
butch"). But though
BOIjI
fails to sustain itself, there can be no doubt
that Tavel has a formidable array of talents. With a little more control, a
little less self-indulgence, he could well emerge as a major dramatist.
The season somewhat compensated for the lack of writing talent
by offering an extraordinary amount of acting talent. Many of the
widely heralded performances actually merited the praise heaped upon
them: Bernadette Peters showed astonishing timing, control and charm
in recreating the stereotypical musical comedy star of the thirties–
innocent, stupid and thoroughly ingratiating - in
Dames at Sea,
itself
a complete delight in its second act, though in its first, too often plain
silly instead of the parody of silliness intended.... In Terence McNally's
short play,
Next,
James Coco managed the difficult feat of bridging the
almost unconnected halves of the play, one comic, one tragic, by under–
playing the gag lines and by suggesting from the start that the character,
seemingly the embodiment of a one-dimensional fat-man joke, had an
underside of torment and rage.... James Earl Jones in
The Great
White
Hope
managed an even more astonishing balancing act: to
be
powerful without being frightening, ingratiating without being servile,
unlettered without being stupid, degraded without being diminished....
Donald Pleasance in
The Man in the Glass Booth
did his brilliant best
to convert the play's false clues and smug uncertainties into a deliberate,
