Word: played
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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WHAT WOODY ALLEN brought to the movie, Renata Adler to the novel and Valerie Harper to the sit-com, playwright John Guare has now brought to the stage--that many-headed artistic monster, the Manhattan neurosis. "Bosoms and Neglect," Guare's newest play, is about therapy. It's about loneliness and "5 a.m. friends." It's about the fulminations of intelligent but broken people who are oppressed by the four walls of their Fifth Avenue apartments. Though a bit tired, these themes can usually withstand a warming over, and Guare's is articulate and wry. The trouble comes when...
Unfortunately, the play consists mostly of such clumsy commentary. It's got only three characters: Henny (mother), Scooper (son), and Dierdre (bibliophile cum girlfriend). 83 and blind, Henny, has battled breast cancer for two years without anybody catching on--hence bosoms and neglect. Scooper, never too lucky with the girls, was about to run off to Haiti with his best friend's wife when Mom's illness was uncovered. He met Dierdre through their common analyst, Dr. James. In her apartment, while Henny's on the operating table, they spill out their tribulations and prayers. Their idiocyncrasies, it seems, know...
...main problem with this play is that all three of the characters are so consistently loco that we become dulled by it. There should be a doorman or a maid or something--someone to set off the shrieking and flyings ashtrays. That, or a tauter script. After the play's rambling dialogues, its climactic scene in which Scooper leaves his blind mother talking to a wheelchair while he and Dierdre run off (to Doubleday?) leaves you cold...
...culture he lives in. But he acts out his irrational moments less convincingly. The abrupt transition from penthouse humor to breakdown is ungraceful because he tries to express his disorder by physical rampaging rather than verbal interpretation. And the baritone he exploited earlier is over-exercised; like the play's belaboring of psychosis, it soon wears thin...
...perhaps, whose zest for discovery is insatiable. Of the three, she best expresses the frailty that foreruns her breakdown. When it comes, it's not an abrupt transition, but rather the natural product of a life of disorder. She alone seems to have grappled with all this before the play's action began...