On Stage

...He has a restless wife and a troubled teenaged stepdaughter, and now his son by a previous marriage comes home, discharged from the Marines after much combat, the mercy killing of his best buddy, and the loss of part of his own intestines in a freak accident...

...Tricia Boyer as Vanessa and T. Miratti as Darrell come off best, even though the dialogue, generally accurate-sounding, fails when it reaches for poetry, leaving the actors stranded...

...She now keeps terribly untidy house for the men, is shrewish, dies several times, and finally ascends to heaven, stopping in mid-air to deliver a nonsense sermon beginning, "However prosperous, you should get out of the house...

...The critics who have admired this formless piece of hysteria have not even tried to explain what the title means...

...This son, Darrell, is a seething psychopath...

...Even when Feiffer's jokes come off, like "The beginning is too soon for unorganized truth," they raise merely smiles or chuckles, not full-bodied laughs...

...small, barrel-chested, and neckless, he is an overgrown dwarf...

...Cope is an Army deserter and pusher, and the monitor tape would prove it, but Nicky refuses to yield it to the FCC or the DA...

...Joan as her quasi-anagram, Noah, and also as woman caught between her traditional role as housewife and her feminist one as embattled reformer...

...She herself, literally, goes through the roof...

...It was initially directed by Jason Robards, who then yielded the reins to Harold Clurman—the first or, rather, first two mistakes...

...I have yet to see a production where everything works, though I have seen many magnificent performances in different mountings, starting with the superb contributions of Fredric March and Jason Robards to the Broadway premiere...

...he makes violent but not wholly resisted love to Nicky's wife, Jane...

...And, by way of final irony, the person who comes off best is Lindsay Crouse, in the unimportant part of Cathleen, the maid...

...She bequeathes her armor to Abe, who goes off to be a gallant knight, and her Voices to Cohn, who decamps pursued by them...

...Given our critics and audiences, his mistakes may pay off: Knock Knock seems to be going over well...

...The poetic wastrel Jamie, that romantic Irish drunk, simply cannot look like this, decent as the performance may be...

...Yet it is not around him and the murder he finally commits that the play revolves, but around the boring Nicky...

...It is also a bunch of Feiffer cartoon sequences pasted together, non se-quiturs and all, into a three-act non-work...

...Robards is all right as Tyrone, but no more than that...

...Here we get an Abe who switches from sniveler to conman to philosopher to hero...

...One could, of course, speculate about Cohn and Abe as Cain and Abel...

...The physical production is deftly managed, with the Voices coming from everywhere, and the house collapsing beautifully...

...Marcia L. Eck's scenery divides the stage neatly into a suburban home and a swinging radio station, and Richard Sothern's staging shuttles quickly and energetically between the two...

...And ludicrously, Michael Moriarty, who plays the younger brother, Edmund, is roughly twice Conway's size...

...One evening, without knowing that some invisible genie (or God) has granted him three wishes, Cohn wishes that Abe were gone, replaced by "someone intelligent...

...It is a congeries of old jokes Feiffer passes off as his own, and new jokes that are his own though not very funny, covering a plot and characters without any bones and an excess of cartilage...

...This much-lauded play by Michael Dorn Moody is, at the very least, two separate plays...

...What gets shortchanged, however, is not the review but the viewer...

...What is this "review" and how is it "shortchanged...

...No wonder the audience laughs more than it weeps—even the last, apocalyptic scene, played against Ben Edwards' mangy set and in Ken Billington's unimaginative lighting, falls flat, thanks to a staging that fails to create a shattering concluding tableau...

...Worse yet are the sons...

...Neither his script for Carnal Knowledge nor his next stage effort, The White House Murder Case, had much to say or an interesting way of saying it...

...The other play, the real one, concerns Nick's domestic difficulties...

...With her unbecomingly upswept hairdo, fidgety hands and mincing steps under a billowing skirt, she scurries and flutters across the stage rather like a large mechanical hen...

...From the Kennedy Center and Xerox comes the Bicentennial Theater production of Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey Into Night, one of the few unquestionable masterpieces of the American stage...

...He suspects, perhaps rightly, that Nicky is homosexually involved with Peter Cope...

...There follows a series of appearances and disappearances (Cohn's second wish is to bring Abe back to life), then, after some knocking on the door and a game of "knock knock," the entrance of Joan of Arc and her invisible yet obstreperous and obnoxiously prankish Voices...

...Rocks with threatening comic messages come through the window and out of the refrigerator...

...I cannot begin to summarize all the silly goings-on, but Joan, who was formerly Cinderella, is inadvertently changed back into that by Cohn's third wish...

...But Knock Knock, his latest, is the ultimate in lack of raison d'etre: an absurdist play about nothing except wanting to concoct a play, which is not reason enough...

...This is a long, intimate play requiring the most tightly knit ensemble acting from its four principals, the loving but demon-haunted, destructive and self-destructive Tyrones...

...Certainly it is well staged by Marshall W. Mason, although his Circle Repertory Company does not provide him with the best actors for it...

...Nicky, moreover, is in grave financial difficulties, and may lose Station WISH (get that...

...More ludicrously, he plays an Edmund suffering not from TB but from catatonia: washed-out, zonked, deadpan...

...It makes no more sense than the rest of the play, where Nicky alternates between heroism and cowardice, Jane between devotedness and disgusted iciness, Darrell between childlike innocence and dangerous insanity, Vanessa between sexual aggressiveness and perfect chastity, Cope between sleaziness and sainthood, and Ed between rapacity and dependability...

...For this is as plodding a staging of a great work as I have ever encountered, deficient in blocking, rhythms, visual values, and casting...

...Daniel Seltzer and Judd Hirsch are adequate, but Neil Flanagan gives us more effeteness than Jewishness (and too many self-conscious pauses) as Abe, and Nancy Snyder is better at looking like Joan than at acting her...

...Abe and Cohn are to be her two schleps, but only Cohn is won over...

...he hasn't found a compelling way of reconciling the flamboyance of the matinee idol with the desperate fear of the shanty Irishman who sees the poorhouse beckoning and turns to mad land-grabbing and miserliness...

...Some of the sight gags are better, but it all wears thin fast because Feiffer mistakes the outrageous for the funny, and a good ear for New York, or New York-Jewish, speech for something automatically and ceaselessly diverting...

...One concerns Nicky Shannigan, a 53-year-old Irish hippie, who runs a public-funded radio station and gets into trouble with the FCC when his phone conversation with Peter Cope, a rock musician whose group he is sponsoring, is accidentally broadcast...

...But what good is such an underlying schema, even if it exists, unless it has been translated into true dramatic terms...

...Even the image doesn't work: if there's no sky, why space ships...

...Kevin Conway is a good actor, but he looks like a cross between Quasimodo and your neighborhood thug...

...Abe and Cohn have lived together in a house in the woods for 20 years, and irritate the hell out of each other...

...Zoe Caldwell is all wrong for Mary...

...at the utmost, one of them gives a tragically bad performance...

...It is all total, or near-total, nonsense, something good absurdist plays are not...

...If there is one quality this actress lacks it is simple sweetness, and here she has to convey not only that basic given, but also its sad, yet still sweet, decomposition...

...he dallies, more or less innocently, with his little stepsister Vanessa...

...a Cohn who goes from smug pragmatist to quixotic idealist to frightened quarry of nasty Voices...

...You would think that not even the Bicentennial Theater could ruin it, but, I must confess with a certain left-handed admiration, they've very nearly managed to...

...The current version is total chaos...

...These Tyrones are not a tragic family...

...to his ambitious sidekick, Ed...

...Wiseman, who transformed himself into a kind of Jehovah, now reappears in various droll or ominous guises— one of them a movie-Western-Style gambler with whom Abe peculiarly gambles, using Joan as the stake (get it...

...Moody, consciously or not, has written a kind of updated Hibernian Death of a Salesman, just as Mason Adams' Nicky is an Irishified Lee J. Cobb—a showy but unmoving performance...

...and so on...

...The Shortchanged Review was taken over by Joseph Papp from the Ensemble Studio Theater, partly recast and wholly refurbished...

...So she hits on a kind of absent-minded detachment out of which moments of concern emerge nagging and hypocritical, not as genuine and heart-breaking beneath the self-pity...

...Promptly Abe disappears, and an uncanny creature called Wiseman sits in his chair...

...Joan announces that the sky has vanished and that she must gather two creatures of each kind, take them to the Emperor who will build a thousand space ships, and then they will all go up to heaven to avoid the holocaust...

...nothing but quicksand...