Word: comically
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Waiting for the Parade is less a play than a series of review sketches, mostly comic, about the women left behind when Canada's men went off to World War II. Director Phillips and a standout cast, notably Carole Shelley, Sheila McCarthy and Susan Wright, almost overcome the predictability of the stories...
...basic problem is predictability. In an effort to constantly remind the audience that this play is a comedy in spite of serious themes, director James Pentecost creates an array of comic types rather than individuals. Lenny, for example, try convince us that she is old and that life is passing her by, repeatedly draws out each of her lines, but the result seems more like a six-year-old whining. Pentecost also tries to make Babe appear naively infantile. But what emerges instead is simply a ridiculous airhead who becomes not only unconvincing but predictable...
...help laughing at Babe's thwarted attempts to hang herself with knitting yarn, or at the speculation over Lenny's secret rendezvous with a Tennessee gentleman. Yet simultaneously, both scenes arouse pity--a comic pathos that only a perceptive and talented playwright like Henley could achieve...
...seriously, folks: What about James Watt? Is it simply a matter of a fellow with poor comic delivery? That most recent remark, the one about the new coal-leasing review commission consisting of "a black, a woman, two Jews and a cripple." It nearly got Watt ousted a few weeks ago. It might yet. Why? Surely the substance of his remark is not taboo. In the right hands, with the right tone, a joke about the overexacting demands of affirmative action could result in genuine, harmless hilarity. But not with Watt. When he tells a joke, the prisoners start...
Something more seems to lie behind Watt's spectacular comic failures, however. Something connected to Watt as a character and to the audience (i.e., the citizenry) he haplessly addresses. His employer, after all, addresses the same audience quite successfully, except for the time he decided to endear himself to a group of professional women: "If it weren't for women, us men would be walking around in skin suits carrying clubs." Usually he does better. Unlike Watt, the President generally prefers humor to comedy, humor being the warmer and more companionable exercise. Comedy cuts off human feeling, humor...