Word: moonchildren
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...writing this review as long as I could, because I'm not sure how to do it. Moonchildren is as funny a comedy as you are likely to see for some time, and like most good comedies it's also serious and strong. Michael Weller wrote it about the people he shared a house with during his senior year at Brandeis (that was 1964-65), people he compares in a program note to walkers across a desert strewn with unmarked patches of quicksand which they can only avoid by signaling to one another in curious and incomprehensible ways...
...REASON I put off writing the review is that I think Moonchildren includes an analysis of student life in general, and I was afraid that if I talked about that I might discourage people from going...
Lots of folks think student life is idyllic. The reason the neighbors complain, the landlord reassures the students in Moonchildren, is that they would give their last hair to live like students themselves. In Moonchildren's first act there's an encyclopedia salesman, a young person like the students or the secretary who envied my freedom. "You study math?" he asked the graduate student. "I'd have liked to study math...My father made me study law." When he realizes the students are of both sexes, the encyclopedia salesman's envy soars still higher, but I don't think Weller...
...MOONCHILDREN is itself an elegiac treatment of the charms--as well as the costs--of the fabled put-on (a form first given definition by Jacob Brackman in the pages of The New Yorker not so many years ago). If you ever went crazy for the Marx Brothers, memorized Soupy Sales routines, religiously watched I Love Lucy and Rocky and his Friends, fell in love with Holly Golightly, you have an instinctive feel for the form. But Weller's not only concerned with the surface jests. They're there to be enjoyed ("Hey, you decided what ya gonna do when...
...Moonchildren is not a faultless play. In structure, it is almost too arbitrary and low-key. But Weller possesses an uncanny ear--just as Catcher in the Rye has become the high schooler's bible of enforced adolescence, Moonchildren could easily become the standard account of our generation's own delayed adulthood. Brandeis is to be commended for mounting a production so promptly, so expertly. (Moonchildren originated at Washington's Arena Stage last fall and then died in February after two weeks on Broadway.) A few members of Peter Sander's cast are a bit too old to make convincing...