Fissionable Confusion

By Gerald Clarke

MARCO POLO SINGS A SOLO by JOHN GUARE

Some playwrights have too few ideas --or none at all. John Guare (House of Blue Leaves) is of a rarer kind: his mind is a virtual breeder reactor of dramatic themes large and small. In Marco Polo Sings a Solo, a comedy now playing at Manhattan's Public Theater, Guare's reactor has run away from him. Ideas meet, collide and cancel one another out, like so many errant atoms, and his play explodes in a dozen directions.

Marco Polo takes place on an island off Norway at the end of 1999, in the early light of the 21st century. Diane and Stony McBride (Madeline Kahn and Joel Grey) are the fun couple of the '90s: he is directing a movie about Marco Polo, and she is having an affair with Tom Wintermouth (Chris Sarandon), a global Mr. Fixit who has ingeniously resolved the Arab-Israeli crisis by creating the state of Saudi Israel.

Stony's father (Chev Rodgers) was a rock star in the days of yore, the '60s, and his mother (Anne Jackson) was the original flower child. But, as Stony now discovers, his mother was really his father as well, having undergone a sex change at Johns Hopkins Hospital. Poor Stony--suffering from a new version of that old dramatic ailment, the identity crisis--dreams of falling in love with a sensuous plant, which at least has roots. Wintermouth finds and loses the cure for cancer. He is instantaneously transformed from the world's hero into its fool for that carelessness, and he ends up with Hitler's love letters to Eva Braun, which he finds buried in the sand. Still, he says--in what seems to be Guare's message as well--"the world needs heroes, or at least people who dream beyond themselves."

Now and then the play has flashes of what it might have been. The first scene, where husband, wife and wife's lover trade epigrams, has some of the flavor of the early Noel Coward--without, unfortunately, Coward's fine, glyptic phrasing. Describing an earthquake that has just killed 20 million Italians, Wintermouth mourns "Poor Italy. Shaped like a boot, and the heel fell off." Madeline Kahn, however, can make even the most ordinary lines sound like Coward.

She does not so much deliver her speeches as pour them out and then wait for them to sparkle into laughter. Such moments do not occur often enough, and neither she nor the rest of the fine cast can make a real play out of Guare's imaginative disorder. Gerald Clarke

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