Imps of the Perverse

By T.E. Kalem

THE RITZ by TERENCE McNALLY

In the past few seasons, "the love that dare not speak its name" has become one of the compulsive chatterboxes of the New York stage. Homosexuality surfaced as an acceptable theme with Mart Crowley's 1968 humane comedy, The Boys in the Band. This was followed by a number of dramas that waxed soulful on the ecstasy-torment of being gay or the purgative honesty (Find Your Way Home) of admitting gayness and acting upon it. Most of these plays were visual testimonials to bodybuilding exercises and auditory proof of acute self-pity but, for all their vibrations, no great shakes as drama. Now the cycle has gone far enough for Terence McNally to reduce it to farce, a genre that depends on the humanly uninvolving mechanics of frivolity.

McNally's towel-clad "Kartoon Komics" frequent the Ritz Baths, a gay rendezvous complete with steam bath, tiny cubicles for man-to-man trysts and a third-rate entertainer, Googie Gomez, a thrush with a condor's appetite for stardom. As the chanteuse, Rita Moreno is a comic earthquake ranking ten on the Richter scale, though her Puerto Rican accent renders some of her lines unintelligible.

A fat, balding Cleveland garbage-disposal contractor, on the lam from his wife's mobster brother, takes refuge among the Ritz's imps of the perverse. What follows is a bedlam of straight-gay confrontations. Robert Drivas directs with manic speed and lashings of hysteria, perhaps recognizing that if this show stops for a minute, it may never start up again. In The Ritz, McNally abandons the idiosyncratic comic vision he brought to Bad Habits (TIME, Feb. 18, 1974) in favor of old vaudeville and burlesque routines. Still, there are plenty of laughs left in those, whichever way you Swing. T.E. Kalem

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.