Mixed Masters

By G. C.

ISADORA DUNCAN SLEEPS WITH THE RUSSIAN NAVY

by JEFF WANSHEL

There are certain plays -- and this is one of them -- that can be called "blender drama" pureed bits of other, better works. The ingredients of Jeff Wanshel's comedy, Isadora Duncan Sleeps with the Russian Navy, are Tom Stoppard, Jules Feiffer and Pirandello, who seems as essential to this brand of ersatz drama as red dye No. 2.

The formula starts with a play within a play or, in this case, a screenplay.

A Hollywood screenwriter (David Ackroyd) is writing a movie about Isadora Duncan, the free-spirited mother of modern dance. While the screenwriter types out her life at the rear of the stage.

Isadora (Marian Seldes) acts it out at the front, along with just about every one else who marched by during the first quarter of this century. Even Stanislavsky has a walk-on, mimicking Marlon Brando's Stanislavsky-inspired Stanley Kowalski. Isadora dutifully responds as Blanche DuBois: "I have always depended on the kindness of strangers."

The cast of the American Place Theater is able and energetic. Someone like Tom Stoppard -- the real Tom Stoppard -- might have turned such loans from other writers into dramatic capital of his own, making Isadora a kind of inspired, transcendental comic strip. For all his borrowings from his betters, Wanshel, however, has forgotten the one essential ingredient of good drama: the play wright's own voice. G.C.

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