Kill & Make Up

Peterpat. In primordial days, man went forth from his cave to vie with Tyrannosaurus rex. Nowadays, he leaves his office cubicle to do battle with Tyrannosaurus regina--his wife. That is the sempiternal issue with which Enid Rudd has made her playwriting debut in this wry, observant, warm and almost steadily amusing comedy.

Peter (Dick Shawn) and Pat (Joan Hackett) enter marriage with eight-ninths of a child, one-tenth of an income, and 999/1,000 of a conviction on Pat's part that she has enough love for the three of them. The infant is not seen but heard, and the squally Eine kleine Nachtmusik rasps on Peter's and Pat's sleep-starved nerves with the first intimation that they are somewhere east of Eden.

Within a few years Peter strikes it rich with a videotic series called Ben Bullet. He takes to wearing one of those silk-sheen suits that look like beaten stainless steel. In his pocket is an offstage mistress, but under his collar is prickly Pat.

The second and last act of Peterpat is a kill-and-make-up reconciliation scene. Under Joe Layton's fluid direction, it is a remarkably resourceful display of in-bed infighting. The sight gags are eruptively funny and the dialogue blends the flip quip with the rueful truth, as when Pat says to Peter apropos of his mistress: "Just think, if you had married her ten years ago, today you could be having an affair with me."

Dick Shawn and Joan Hackett are admirable foils. He paints the clown-husband character with broad vaudevillian brush strokes. She is a comic pointilliste, and her precise inflections of wifeliness dot the brain like a quiver of hatpins. Peterpat sometimes gets enveloped in the vapors of farce, but one deep breath of comic wisdom animates it--marriage is as funny as hell.

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