The Org Man Cometh

Absence of a Cello, by Ira Wallach, is an amusing, though not wildly amusing, farce based on the proposition that the corporate image is a fright mask and that any man who puts it on won't recognize himself any more.

Andrew Pilgrim (Fred Clark) is a renowned academic scientist who is deep in debt. He has a handsome offer from a corporation called Baldwin-Nelson. Pilgrim is a kind of disorganization man. He plays the cello and knows all about ultrasonic energy, but he cannot turn off the vacuum cleaner or find his shoelaces. His wife (Ruth White) pens scholarly works on dead languages.

With an interviewer from Baldwin-Nelson coming, they decide to act so square that they could pass for cubes. Out goes the cello; in comes a dust-laden TV set. Copies of the Reader's Digest and McCall's are scattered about. "Where'd you get these?" asks Pilgrim in wonderment. "I subscribe to the incinerator," comes the answer.

The interviewer (Murray Hamilton) is as bright as a computer with a somewhat more insidious charm. Oh, yes, they want questioning minds at Baldwin-Nelson, only "the questioning mind must ask the same questions we ask." He describes the familial intimacy of corporate life, complete with a tidy housing development ("Some of the houses are colonial, some Tudor, but the best ones are both"). After further visits by the org man, Pilgrim decides to end the demeaning charade, only to find that the interviewer has seen through the conformity act all along, and has a few cellos of his own hidden away.

Thanks to Playwright Wallach's quip hand, nimble direction by James Hammerstein, and faultless comic timing by a superior cast, Cello breezes along even when it is replaying the same joke. But the plot is strangely unknowing in its pivotal notion. No sane corporation would think of stamping a scientist of stature into a cog-sized mold. And nowadays scientists do not "sell out"--they buy in, by forming their own companies and voting themselves stock options.

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