On Stage

...But when the American planes fly over the capital of Nonomura, a thrilling sound that reassures all the assembled caricatures, they inexplicably begin dropping bombs...

...For even though the play gives every indication of being a commercial success, it nevertheless represents a colossal failure of nerve which may well be a function of the age and position of the writer...

...And not very much of a thought while we are there...

...The result is an incredibly shallow work about the most serious of subjects, an evening of dumb-dumb one-liners that could just as easily have been written by Bob Hope as Art Buchwald...

...Margaret Ladd's Holly, innocent to the point of idiocy, is a sicken-ingly sweet lisping simp who would much rather be back at Radcliffe so she can organize workers at Gim-bel's...

...It wants a resonance, a darker more serious voice...

...A private nightmare that disarm-ingly comes on like a kiddy cartoon, it has a distinct style that is both its virtue and vice...

...Porpentine, although he occasionally comes down to enter the action, unhappily does not supply the missing element...

...An example, perhaps, of what happens to a style and strategy transplanted from one medium to another...

...In Act Two, the Ambassador sends his daughter home to placate Prince Gow and become grata again...

...In the only truly satiric thrust of the evening (lifted from Shaw's Heartbreak Housed), the General cries out in comic despair as the curtain comes down "Oh my God, they thought I said Plan D!" For the record, the play contains a couple of amusing trifles and one routine that almost works...

...Distressed because new weaponry is on the way to what has just become a Communist country, the nervous General calls Washington and asks for "Plan B." In the meantime much is righted and resolved, for it is discovered that the last takeover actually was engineered by a cia agent posing as an "inscrutable Oriental"-buchwald really uses the term, thinking it ironic-who had been a servant in the Ambassador's house...

...And when he is old enough to leave home, he finds himself a rather odd roommate whose invisible talking pig bedevils the both of them...

...James Cherry lives in a spooky world where everyone close to him dies horribly, in ways the poor persecuted James seems to have un-deliberately willed...

...Yet whatever its faults, The Disintegration of James Cherry is a tender and affecting work...

...On Stage PUBLIC SATIRE AND PRIVATE DREAMS BY DAN ISAAC Art Buchwald's Sheep on the Runway shows that its author does have a few ideas in the back of his mind-the same ones many intelligent Americans have had about Vietnam since 1965, But this so-called satire at the Helen Hayes Theater so trivializes whatever it touches that one can only assume it was crafted to please all parties...

...But what better fault could a young writer have...

...Even underdeveloped nations consider it an underdeveloped nation, according to one typically lackwit line...

...but to accept such slender wit and wisecracking as a full evening's entertainment is something else...

...The routine that almost works: An ungainly Washington bureaucrat, who has come to Nonomura to raise the standard of living, and a squat American general, who has come to turn the nation into another Vietnam, begin arguing about whether bridges should be built or blown up, finally settling on a compromise that will permit the one to build and the other to destroy...

...Looking to the future, her parents predict that Holly will continue to embarrass them by burning down Radcliffe (ha-ha-ha...

...and I wonder if the di-rection might not have been more helpful here, providing a beat or motif to better drive home the rhythm implicit in the writing and the scenic montage...

...But new complications arise as several coups rock the country, sending waves of ousted politicians into the American embassy seeking asylum...

...All of which made me think that a few fast spasms in his present role as guard to the new ruler of Nonomura might have done wonders for an evening where sight gags were nonexistent...

...A unique talent, he gave a wild performance in The Apple of a spastic -twisting, jerking and grunting on stage for almost a full two and a half hours...

...Here we get a pretty good model for the way in which competitive and conflicting impulses in the American character-each given approval and power from different arms of the political Establishment -tend to cancel one another out...

...Holly -delineated in a cast of caricatures by the Indian headband around her hair-who organizes the Nono-muran university students to march on her father's embassy...

...Too frequently the work tends toward a Salinger-like preciousness and a dreamy wonder for the beauty of words...

...Or is it something more subtle...

...Eccentric, personal and paranoid, Jeff Wanschel's The Disintegration of James Cherry is precisely the kind of thing that an experimental theater should be doing...

...and when the Ambassador's wife plans to serve meat loaf at a dinner for Prince Gow, she explains to her husband that the dish is President and Mrs...

...But Buchwald is too busy making jokes to sustain a consistently penetrating point of view...

...The revolutions prove a source of discomfiture not only to the Ambassador but also to an American Army general who has come on a selling mission, military hardware catalogue hot in hand...

...Suggesting more the exasperation of a Jewish father than the frustration of an American diplomat, David Burns, who creates the lead, rolls his eyes to the back of his head as he delivers the Act-One curtain line in time-honored Broadway tones: "The shame of it is, I'm being kicked out of a country nobody's ever heard of...

...Struggling to create at least the semblance of cohesion, Wanschel has an absurd Jovian character called Mendacious Por-pentine sit high above the stage, delivering senseless weather reports to bridge scenes: "Lightning and bleeding rain./ Furious blizzards, comets and gallstones./ A breaking wind...

...The theater, after all, is a public meeting place, a last vestige of the town hall...

...Like everything else about Buchwald's alleged satire, she is ingratiatingly gooey-a teasing nudge in the ribs to let you know that this is only a spoof, not to be given another thought once we leave the theater...

...A sad footnote to this silly production was seeing one of my favorite actors, Henry Proach, in a walk-on role-not even a speaking part?and discovering that he was not listed in the cast biographies in the back of the program...

...To read a humorous column as a 30-second respite from the massive bombardment of hard facts and questionable inferences that inundate readers of daily newspapers is one thing...

...If we must have comedies about Vietnam, let it be a grotesque Theater of the Ridiculous...

...Sister falls off the roof, Grandma falls down the stairs, and Father is eaten by an alligator while at the zoo with his son...

...Nixon's favorite...

...Al the Lincoln Center Forum, a cozy intimate theater tucked away in the basement of the Vivian Beaumont, a play is being presented that is the complete antithesis of what Broadway usually has to offer...

...When the strange, picaresque hero?soft as an octopus, quiet as an eggplant" -describes the comic-pathetic circumstances of his own death in the speech that ends the play, Wanschel achieves a lyricism and poignancy that a satirist like Buchwald might casually mock but never master...

...A political fantasy about an American ambassador stationed in Nonomura -a small, imaginary Asian nation high up in the Himalayas-Sheep on the Runway never takes itself seriously enough to be anything more than an indulgent wink at the foolishness of our political folkways and foreign policy...

...The reference in the title is to a nation so backward that its animals are always getting in the way of airplanes...

...No question about it, Cherry's life is filled with animus and animation...

...Since in the past I have enjoyed many of Buchwald's newspaper columns, I have been trying to figure how he could have blundered into such an obnoxious affair as Sheep on the Runway...

...Once there, they begin to haggle over who will get the guest room...

...The first mock crisis is created by the Ambassador's hippie-radical daughter...

...Filled with innumerable short scenes, some of which seem to have been written for the sake of a single punch line, Disintegration is always in danger of disintegrating for lack of a spine...

...Perhaps what the play really needs is what one character prescribes for James Cherry?a good metaphysic...

...One of the original members of The Living Theater in the days of the 14th-Street loft, Proach was in both Jack Gelber plays presented there...

...The amusing trifles: In the cia agent's recondite phone report, Disneyland is a code word for Washington...

...The plays opens with a tiresome series of gags about the little kingdom's isolation...

...Angered by Holly's revolutionary behavior, the fat and oily Oriental potentate who runs the country, Prince Gow, declares the Ambassador persona non grata...