Bim Bom Ban Bang On

Eh?, by Henry Livings, is a comedy of incongruity, unpredictability, originality and farcical absurdity. Its hero, Valentine Brose (Dustin Hoffman), is a Buster Keaton in a mod outfit who occasionally breaks into sly and menacing smiles. His mind is a running assault on logic. He is a living non sequitur. But his madness is the sanity of seers.

In this Off-Broadway import from England, the setting is a boiler room, and virtually the only prop is the boiler. This behemoth is a triumph of mechanical indigestion, hiccuping, squealing, glug-glugging, roaring, and occasionally subsiding with a grandiose belch. Anyone who thinks the machine will subdue the man is in for a head-spin. No machine, man, or woman can tame Valentine Brose. When he applies for the boilerman job, he hopes the hours will permit him to collect his unemployment checks from a previous job. During the interview with Works Manager Price (Dana Elcar) he exudes balmy assurance, balmy panic and total inertia: "I'm satisfactory all right. Always been satisfactory. All my school reports: satisfactory satisfactory satisfactory. I went to the Grammar School, you know. I did Latin. Satis meaning enough, factory meaning works: Satisfactory. Had enough of work."

Told by Price that he must be on hand at 11:55 p.m. to press a button, Brose instantly bridles: "Didn't you tell me it was an easy job?" Price is all for throwing this cheeky beggar out, but Brose won't buy it: "I'll get you, don't you worry. Some night when you're going for your bus. Scuffle, then clunk. There won't be much blood to speak of, just an agony and an aching, and not being able to drag yourself along the wet pavement."

Brose is equally candid with the personnel director, Mrs. Murray (Elizabeth Wilson). Mrs. Murray is a corset-bound volume of Freudian cliches. She is both primly inhibited and latently lecherous, and Brose sniffs out the strange musk of her personality: "Like when you said what was my relations with my mother, I just couldn't stop myself saying 'son'; it came straight out. I've been wondering what the proper answer was, her being dead."

Out of the blue, Brose will say: "Bim bom ban on his brain pan." Except for a slight slackening of the pace in Act II, it's bim bom ban, bang on, all the wEh. Brose moves his pink-nightie-clad bride (Alexandra Berlin) into the boiler room and begs her for understanding. Says she fretfully: "The trouble with getting inside your head is that once I'm there I'm on my own." Brose has been growing mushrooms in the boiler room, and near curtain's drop they sprout hallucinogenic caps. Brose munches on one and can see Mrs. Murray naked. She flees, trying desperately to shield herself with her personnel folder. "D'you like happy endings?" says Brose with a happy wink.

In his directorial debut, Actor Alan Arkin (Luv, The Russians Are Coming) snake-dances the cast through this gorgeous farce and produces sight gags to match the early silent two-reelers. The players are perfect, and Dustin Hoffman is pluperfect. Apart from turning Harold Pinter upside down and dispelling all the potential menace in laughter, Playwright Livings achieves one added distinction: he has done an anatomy of modern mass man. As the stereotype has it, this is the man who will be reduced to electronic button pushing and social homogeneity, tutored to spend his leisure time with Shakespeare and symphonies. Brose shows no such inclinations. Industrial technology is a fascinating toy to him, and he is the contented child of pop culture; yet he has a curious, steely desire to think for himself. The old sanctions of God, church, state, family, boss, work have all dropped out of his ethical vocabulary. He is a law unto himself, frenetically comic, highly individualistic, a little man of unpredictable size.

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