WISE CHILD

(1972 Broadway Comedy/Drama)





WISE CHILD A review by Walter Kerr of THE NEW YORK TIMES


What would you say this play was about? A parentless boy of 19 or so, blonde and mussy, spots an older man who is wanted for a crime. He blackmails him. He won't turn him in provided the older man comes home with him and does what he wants. He wants him to dress up to play the part of his "mum." He has bras and earrings and wigs and wedgies waiting in the closet for the purpose.

For a time it suits the criminal just fine: it's an effective disguise to hide out in. But his growing womanliness worries him. He wants to use his muscle again. "I'm 53 years old and I'm lost to meself," he says, whereupon he persuades a black girl who works in their hideout hotel to strip for him. The boy in the next room bangs on the locked door because he doesn't want "mum" doing this sort of thing.

The boy is meanwhile pursued by the hotel manager, a homosexual who does not admit to homosexuality but insists upon investing his desires with a religious significance. Prayers come first; and a large portrait of a clergyman, now shipped off to Canada as a result of his proclivities, must adorn the boy's mantel.

Eventually the criminal can stand the imposture no longer. He strips off his necklaces, reveals himself as bald, changes into men's clothing. At which point the boy appears quietly from behind a door, dressed and wigged as a girl, perhaps perpared now to call the older man "dad."

Wouldn't you say it had something to do with our habit of projecting our needs onto other people, turning them into the fantasy figures we feel we require? If that's even remotely close to the meaning of the narrative, you wouldn't have know it from the production of Simon Gray's Wise Child that was offered here.

The play is gone now, and no one would care to whistle it back. But, apart from the fact that Alec Guinness seems to have made a respectable success of it in London, there are two reasons why it is worth mentioning in retrospect. The piece as presented was hopelessly obscure: we hadn't the faintest notion of what we were watching while we were watching it; any clues I've suggested have been pieced together laboriously from notes. It was obscure because neither actors nor director had taken any pains whatever first to detect and then to project the possible shape of the play, and because the playwright himself had employed an increasingly common method of writing his play backwards.

This business of the actors is tough. In situations like this one, we are inclined to say of the actors---especially if we know them to be good ones---that they did everything humanly possible to rescue the evening. We send them away absolved, letting the playwright absorb all of the blame. In this case no absolution was possible.

Donald Pleasence, a magnetic performer in The Caretaker and The Man in the Glass Booth, here quickly and flatly settled for a nasal, nonstop, utterly uninflected cockney speech that was in itself a confession of desperation. Not knowing what the play's points were, he made none: he simply kept going---between excessive and excessively farcical swigs at his whisky bottle---as though fearful that an open space would promptly be filled by unfriendly comments from the auditorium.

George Rose, fondly remembered for his Common Man in A Man For All Seasons, picked up Mr. Pleasence's run-on rate (their voices became almost interchangeable at times), adding to it only a smarmy whine that seemed incapable of variation. The boy, played by Bud Cort, made frantic motions behind doors: beating his breast, clapping his forehead, massaging his legs, behaving at all times as though he were in need of immediate medical help. There was never any felt impulse behind this sorry windmill: the flailings always seemed in response to a director's cue, aborted indications of an anguish that was missing.

I have admired James Hammerstein's work as a director on certain earlier occasions. Here he settled for such patently unfunny stage business as having Mr. Pleasence emerge from a hurried search through a traveling bag with a necklace dangling from his ear. The timing of the frequent charging from hotel room to hotel room, weak Marx Brothers style, was inexplicable. Mr. Pleasence would frequently slip from one room, just missing others entering it, without any premonition that he need do so. Everything was arbitrary, irrelevant, more appropriate to Up In Mabel's Room than to a blackly serious play. The people involved simply hadn't asked themselves what Mr. Gray might be up to.

What Mr. Gray is up to is the second thing that needs discussion. Like many another playwrights nowadays, and no doubt weary of the linear, logical playwriting that has indeed staled on us and needs refreshing, he has begun more or less at the end of things, with his situation established but with no explanation offered. Not yet. We simply meet a man dressed as a woman sharing a hotel with a boy who calls him "mum."

We are asked to accept this, and interest ourselves in its absurdity, for two long acts while only very, very gradually does the author drop a hint or two as to how it all might have come into being. It is not, for instance, until the final five minutes of the play that we learn how the boy blackmailed the criminal into posing as his mother. This, I venture to suggest, is a bit late. We have spent the entire evening arriving at the opening situation.

The practice is of course meant to tease us, to reflect the actual ambiguities we know life to contain, to suggest an impenetrability---especially where personality is concerned---that does dog us in our daily lives. It takes a long time, and a devious path, to get at the truth of any human relationship. And the play does tease us for, say, 15 minutes. After that, we want it to begin.

What is seriously wrong with the method as it is now employed is that it circumvents the play. We spend several hours studying the status quo. At the very end we are given a reason for it. But that is only the first step any true play takes: the establishment of a particular state of things. The steps that usually follow---and that keep the occasion from going dull on us---show that state of things being wrecked, or improved, or interestingly altered in some way. Here we have no room for all that; we are spending the whole time doing the set-up.

It does go dull, dreary even. We are not being adequately occupied. There are a thousand angles from which a playwright can come in at his material. But he must not leave us, come 10 o'clock, at the starting-post.

Review © 1972 THE NEW YORK TIMES. All Rights Reserved.





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