Still Breaking Away: Farce Which Punches Too Hard

...The audience with which I saw Division Street at one of the last previews went laughing from the theater, but it was not the laughter of mockery or derision...

...Tesich, recalling his bicycling days in the Times, lets us know that his team won the "Little 500," which means the university team not the townies, but it was artistically and psychologically—perhaps even ideologically—sound to give the victory in the movie to the underdogs and let us all come out on top...

...A joke about commitment, then, but it reaches back to a serious speech that Chris has made, explaining the 1960s to a girl too young to have experienced them, and it reaches out into the auditorium...

...as the characters move to the front, a giant American flag drops from above, filling the stage...

...Here, the repetition becomes tiresome—the character who harps on the tyranny of female orgasm provides the best example—but I suspect that the reason lies in the decision to play the characters as complete cartoons with no incipient human beings glimpsed behind the farce masks...

...Already a Ribman admirer by then, I had gone to see Fingernails and to have a look at the American Place's new quarters...

...In the play, Chris, a hero of the 1960s, convert to the ME generation, is discovered when an alert photographer catches him upchucking on the street after an inedible ethnic meal...

...Preposterous, like the flag that corny vaudeville performers used to produce to cap their collapsing act...

...The restaurant owner, come to reclaim his honor, is a Serbian immigrant who speaks in mangled American cliches...

...John Lithgow has a fine sense of farce timing, but his Chris suggests not only the traditional farce protagonist but a real man beset by a past that he both wants and hates to escape...

...Chris takes up his bullhorn and the song comes up, a mighty massed choir on the sound system...

...His way of sneaking it in is about as quiet as a kettle drum in a phone booth, but it seems to work...

...so I may not have been properly predisposed to receive Tesich's offering...

...There had not been a farce worthy of the name on Broadway since Murray Schisgal's All Over Town (1975), and it simply presented the genre without attempting to transcend it...

...The event and the publicity bring to his apartment a number of his old associates and several other people who need the community of the old idealism...

...Breaking Away came, then, as a surprise and apleasure...

...Anthony Holland, as a nerd so inconsequential as to be virtually invisible, retains the ability, which he has had since his Second City days, to put pathos into a cliche...

...it was a kind of warmth that recognized the ludicrousness of the play's ending but embraced it all the same...

...The success of a farce depends on the audience's acceptance of the artificial identification tags and the cheerful anticipation of their repeated use...

...Its weaknesses are those of a farce which punches too hard, and it is saved—in so far as it is saved—by an ending which is a kind of cousin to the one in Breaking Away...

...Division Street certainly makes use of all the standard farce devices—mistaken identities, confrontations avoided in an hysteria of exits and entrances, characters on the verge of caricature—and its subject (where have all the flowers gone...

...These conventional farce figures speak lines that recall the past and comment on the present, sometimes satirically, and sing snatches of movement songs, more nostalgically than comically...

...Nineteen-thirties movie comedies, turning Marianne Moore inside out, put imaginary toads in real gardens, presented a collection of eccentrics who borrowed validity from their surroundings and the performers who embodied them, and manipulated incident and character to reach the ritual happy ending which—although we might not get the girl, the job, the round of applause—assured us that such an ending was always a possibility...

...The joke about Chris's landlady is that she is a Black woman with a Polish accent, and Commonweal: 662 his Black-revolutionary chum, now a policewoman since his sex change, is saddled with a drag turn in which the masculine mannerisms keep breaking through...

...Thus Chris's former wife carries a bullhorn, which makes some sense as a torch for a lost love, but for no discernible reason she speaks in song lyrics that predate the decade of revolution...

...My own Indiana connections make me suspect the reality of some of the characters, but they were played as real people, thus harking back to a kind of movie that was popular before fourteen-year-old Tesich emigrated from Yugoslavia—before he was born, for that matter...

...The news that Tesich's new play Division Street, warmly received at the Mark Taper in Los Angeles, was a farce on a serious subject held a happy promise...

...is an important one...

...In the Times interview, Tesich said that he can feel the return of the kind of idealism that marked the 1960s (he had presumably not been watching the presidential campaigners in action), but he says too that people are suspicious of optimism'and that a writer has to "just sort of sneak it in...

...even he begins to turn simply shrill as Tesich makes him do his bit once too often...

...Each of them, as farce characters usually are, is identified by a particular compulsion and/or decorated with a verbal or physical tic...

...Stage STILL BREAKING AWAY FARCE WHICH PUNCHES TOO HARD THE ONLY Steve Tesich play I saw before the movie Breaking Away was Lake of the Woods, which shared stage space at the American Place Theatre with Ronald Ribman's Fingernails Blue as Flowers back in 1971...

...I wish the rest of the play did, too...

...These elements would mix uncomfortably if they were not brought together by the odd ending...

...First one, than another character picks it up, but this parody of the end of The Deer Hunter takes a direction of its own...

...Now, almost ten years later, all that I remember is a handful of people milling about in a woods full of significance rather than trees and my exasperation with the whole enterprise...

...gerald weales 21 November 1980: 663...

...The two exceptions indicate the possibility lost...

...In Breaking Away, Tesich and director Peter Yates returned to the substance of an earlier kind of popular film at a time when the best that moviegoers were likely to get was the surface recollection of genre parody...

...In a recent interview in the New York Times (October 5), Tesich said of his early plays,' 'I saw all those people as people, not as symbols of Old America or New America or whatever," but a playwright who sets his play in the "Great Outdoors"—and not as a joke—may justly be suspected of symbolic leanings...

...With the entire cast gathered for the final curtain, the identities all sorted out and everyone urging Chris to lead the new crusade, the restaurateur begins softly to sing "America, the Beautiful...