Before You Go

The two character man-woman play is now a Broadway staple. Lawrence Holofcener's Before You Go ranks with Two for the Seesaw and The Owl and the Pussycat as the best of the genre. Wry, perceptive, honest, sad, funny and tender, it is compassionately discerning about two people who are not quite wise to themselves.

Rain, always lovers' weather onstage, drives Sylvia into Stan's Greenwich Village flat. She (Marian Seldes) is a bookkeeper who poses as an actress on the basis of her sessions at group-therapy psychodrama. He (Gene Troobnick) is a sportswear buyer who poses as a sculptor by coating tennis rackets, mannequin legs and xylophones with plaster of paris. It is not so much the chemistry of love that fuses the pair as the mutual palpitating fear that they may be cultural dropouts.

Cherishing the delusion that he is a swinger, Stan is, in self-dismayed fact, a thirtyish virgin. Given to incessant self-analysis and self-recrimination, Sylvia has strained the juices of life into psychologically labeled jars. The pair's mating dance is jittery and erratic but unfalteringly human. One wondrously comic blackout sequence in which Stan is baffled by bra hooks, stuck zippers and the location of a misplaced contraceptive could serve as a catalogue of the frustrating minutiae that can reduce seduction to helpless farce.

Skittering about the stage in mock retreat, Marian Seldes is awkward, angular, sexy--and touchingly vulnerable. She gives the finest feminine performance on Broadway. A graduate of Chicago's Second City Troupe, Troobnick brings to the play an improvisatory skill in portraying the contemporary personality who changes views, looks, and even voice in a matter of seconds.

The way of a modern man with a modern maid is surpassing strange, but Playwright Holofcener has got it on stage, got it laughing, and got it right.

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