Stage:

...Sheldon has been promoted to an amorphous job as majordomo of the green room...

...Jerry is the hyper one, fueled not only by ambition but by drink and drugs as well...

...Bland may, even if it is only kidding, suggest that this may not be a kinder, gentler America...

...Although I had a way of calling her on a day in which she was trying to do forty-eight things at once-which would have been almost any day-that wonderful, welcoming voice of hers seemed to indicate that nothing could have pleased her more at the moment than finding me and my demands at the other end of the line...

...I shall miss Anne...

...In the first act, in two completely separate scenes, we meet all the principals who will come together in the second...

...G. w...

...One of the actors in The Live Wire, faced with Leo's triumph, says, "trouble with me is I was brought up on Alger books and a few Frank Merriwells...

...And cowboy pictures-and happy endings...

...Tom is the quiet partner, devoted to the art of comedy...

...Between them, they should know the business well enough to get the milieu right, which they seem to have done...

...The second scene takes place in the basement of a cheap nightclub where Jerry and his partner, Tom Kelly, have just finished their act-apparently a semisur-real character bit-and where the partnership comes apart as Jerry insists on signing a contract with Sal, the mafia-connected club owner...

...There's a lot of variety but it all tastes the same...

...The gritty texture of the play and the comic lines-funny and not funny-presumably come from Geoghan...

...it is about standup comedians struggling to reach the summit of their profession, a spot on the "Buddy King (i.e., Johnny Carson) Show...

...Their styles are inimical-Sheldon with his briefcase and pencil sharpener, Jackie with his mental file of other people's jokes- although Sheldon, also a joke collector of sorts, not only knows all Jackie's punch lines but who first used the gags...

...Provenza as Jerry is flesh-crawlingly convincing in this scene, but then the performances-some of which are written on a single note-are generally good in the production, including, on the night I saw the piece, understudy Jerry Grayson as Sal...

...In 1989, Jim Geoghan's Only Kiddingl opened off-Broadway, after an earlier production by the American Jewish Theater...

...Jackie's new routine, the only extended comic sequence we get, is a narrative based on his heart attack in which he is his own comic butt...

...The roseate finish is not implicit in the characters or their world...

...Maybe only on stage...

...Standup comedy is flourishing with comedy clubs proliferating in most cities, as Geoghan indicates in a recent article in the New York Times...

...His vanity and his fear of failure are so strong that he savages everyone around him, finally provoking the gentle Sheldon to pick up the ice bucket...

...They all meet in the green room on the night that both Jackie and Jerry are to appear, but Jerry, using Sal, maneuvers to get Jackie bumped from the show...

...and Jerry, thanks to Sal's connections, is presumably a rising young comic, but what we see is an aggressively hysterical man, dependent on booze and drugs, who, like the Jackie of the first act, is unable to get his routine together...

...It is happily presented without self-pity, the usual stock-intrade of the vulnerability comics, but aggression, aimed outward or inward, provides the two main genres of psychological comedy...

...Geoghan and Kierland and audiences still do apparently...

...Jackie has had a by-pass operation (he clutched his chest in the first act) and has become a transformed character...

...Jackie, flamboyantly foul-mouthed, explains that the way to win an audience is to choose a victim from a front table and make her (his example is a fat lady) the butt of nasty remarks that turn the rest of the audience against her...

...In more than twenty years that I have been reviewing plays for Commonweal, she had the really difficult job of calling press representatives and calling them again and calling them still again to explain why the reviewer for a magazine with so small a circulation had to have tickets on the day of his choosing...

...It was the selfish one, the manipulative one, the malignant one who made it big, leaving the communal nest he had fouled on his way to Hollywood heaven...

...Paul Provenza, who plays Jerry Goldstein, the villain of the piece, is a successful standup comedian, having performed on all the correct TV variety programs, including the "Johnny Carson Show...

...I got so I believed 'em...

...STAGE STANDING UP FOR ONE'S OWN GEOGHAN'S 'ONLY KIDDING' Perhaps this is a kinder, gentler America after all...

...I doubt that that is what Only Kiddingl wants to say...

...In an interview essay by Louis Botto in Playbill (August 1989), Geoghan thanks Joseph Scott Kierland, "a terrific structuralist" (presumably not in the sense that word has around faculty clubs these days) who runs a play writing lab, and gives him credit for the ending...

...You can hate yourself or hate someone else, but you need not take your cultural context seriously...

...As for political satire, what we hear of the offstage Buddy King opener is as innocuous and ideologically empty as its counterparts from Johnny Carson...

...It is bad-mouthing, Bob Hope style-the kind that gets you invited to the White House...

...He quotes Provenza: "Standup comedy today is like an all-you-can-eat buffet...

...it was about a group of actors who shared a Quonset hut while they struggled to succeed in the theater...

...The first scene takes place in the Catskills where Jackie Dwayne, an old-time master of the borrowed one-liner, is failing once again and where Sheldon Kelinski, a gag writer for Buddy King, comes, at their shared agent's insistence, to try to save his act...

...Jackie goes on in his place and, as Sheldon and Tom watch the monitor that we cannot see, the laughter tells us-and them- that Jackie is achieving the success that Jerry tried to steal from him...

...Geoghan began as a standup comic, spending eight years on his feet before he sat down and became a playwright...

...I shall miss that voice...

...A fictional world in which success involves getting up off the sleaze floor and climbing Mt...

...Although the selfish one, the malignant one tries to be manipulative (as Leo says in The Live Wire, "nobody looks out for Daddy if Daddy don't look out for Daddy"), the good guys defeat him, leaving him knocked out cold on the floor of Buddy King's green room, felled by an ice bucket, while the good-guy comic is knocking the audience dead...

...She was as patient with me as she was with the publicity people...

...In the three years between acts, Tom has become a writer for Buddy King...

...G. w.known...

...I feel that way about even the most successful comics...

...This review must sound plottier than my columns usually do, but it is difficult to dredge too much significance from a show called Only Kiddingl A generalization on standup comedy, perhaps, but mine would probably not be Geoghan's...

...GERALD WEALES Beyond the call Anne Robertson was the most patient person I have ever known...

...I suspect that she is one of the few really good people I have ever known...