A Lovely Couple

Elaine May is a corrosively perceptive satirist with a mean comic punch. Her off-Broadway one-acter Adaptation, the first of a double bill completed by Terrence McNally's Next, makes one laugh till it hurts, partly because the ache of recognition is in every line and situation. She has the wit to see that if Pavlov's dogs salivated at the tinkle of bells signifying food, modern man is not so very different. He salivates at psychological flash cards marked Emotional Maturity, Identity Crisis, Making a Commitment, as well as at traditional cues for action such as Education, Work, Love, Marriage, Family, Success.

The play is cleverly staged like a TV contest game. The game, of course, is life, and the unflinchingly ironic viewpoint of Adaptation is that life is a game played on as well as by the contestant. The four actors play many roles: parent, child, teacher, psychologist, husband, wife, in a fiendishly swift journey through the seven ages of man. As a buzzer sounds, the contestants hop from one huge checkerboard square to another. A games master indicates roles, crises and situations, and penalties or bonuses are meted out. The play is a running spoof on psychoanalytical jargon, which has become the emotional pidgin English of the day.

The humor is as contemporary as the minute hand on a watch. For example, the hero is about to enter college. His father asks him what he intends to major in. The boy replies, "Hotel management," since he dreams of running his own hotel. The father says that he too had had a dream, that of owning a liquor store, but it had never come true. He cautions the boy that he must be realistic and have something solid to fall back on. Replies the boy: "I'm minoring in cinema, Dad."

Miss May has apparently been majoring in stagecraft. As the neophyte director of her own play, she shows herself to be an accomplished pro, with a crisp and zany comic flair. From Gabriel Dell, the hero who plays the adaptation game from birth to death, she elicits a performance that is laugh-and letter-perfect. Expressions cross his face like clouds scudding across the sky: hope, bewilderment, apprehension, chagrin, humiliation, and wild fleeting moments of joy. It is the year of the loser, on and off Broadway: Dustin Hoffman in Jimmy Shine, Woody Allen in Play It Again, Sam (see below). Gabriel Dell is the most endearing loser of them all. The rest of the cast act with infinite finesse to make Adaptation coruscatingly funny.

Draped in the Flag. While Terrence McNally's Next does not have quite the dazzle of Adaptation, it, too, is richly comic and McNally's best play to date. At an antiseptically bleak Army induction center, a potential draftee (James Coco) appears for his physical examination. He is fortyish, fat, balding, and obviously the victim of some computer error. Nonetheless, his examiner (Elaine Shore), a squat female sergeant of stony mien and rigid devotion to the Army manual, proceeds with the examination. In a sequence of mounting hilarity, the thoroughly discomfited Coco is forced to strip down. The apex of comic modesty is reached when Coco tries to avoid total exposure by draping himself in the American flag.

This is followed by an inquisitorial barrage of absurd personal questions that might have been dreamed up in a collaboration between Kafka and lonesco. After this humiliation, Coco turns on his impassive tormentor in a tirade that is pitiful but disruptive, the only flaw --and a slight one--in an otherwise memorable production. Giving an enormously resourceful performance, James Coco is a kind of vulnerable pixy. He can bare every scar on his psyche and yet coyly tease a line the way a hairdresser teases a curl.

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