Taking It Off

By Lance Marrow

MY FAT FRIEND

by CHARLES LAURENCE

With apologies to the Gay Liberation movement, this funny and affectionately bitchy play might better have been called My Fag Friend. Lynn Redgrave is supposedly the star of the proceedings--a pathologically tubby bookstore owner who 1) outgrows muumuus as she miserably devours chocolates; 2) meets and falls in love with an itinerant oil geologist; 3) heroically goes off her feed in order to turn herself into what looks like a young Angela Lansbury, only to discover 4) that her lover, back from prospecting in Iran, actually prefers fat girls, whereupon 5) the cellulite freak abruptly departs and 6) a sadder but psychologically thinner Lynn sets out to face the future, like a reformed alcoholic with a missionary taste for Diet Pepsi.

That much of it amounts to one joke--and not an especially good one. The real star of the show--in fact, its only excuse-- is George Rose, who plays Lynn's magnificently swishy lodger Henry, a middle-aged queen mum supervising her diet and her life. The play is full of Henry's preening, his outrageous, satiric gaiety, which has something quite likable about it. Rose, who looks here like a limp Morey Amsterdam, brings the fat farm drama alive.

My Fat Friend is abundant with laughs, although often of the kind that one instantly regrets having laughed: adolescent fat and fag jokes, even bathroom humor. Lynn Redgrave's contribution amounts to shedding her padded underwear during half time and acting reasonably well, whenever she can forget Georgie Girl. But Rose is a lovely Rose.

Lance Morrow

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