Diasporadic Fun

Don't Drink the Water, by Woody Allen. That Broadway staple, the Jewish family-situation comedy, has gone into Diaspora in recent years. In A Majority of One, Gertrude Berg donned a kimono and somewhere between the tea ceremony and the kosher sukiyaki won the heart of a Japanese gentleman. The Zulu and the Zayda made color-unconscious buddies out of Menasha Skulnik and a Zulu tribesman. In Don't Drink the Water, a touring New Jersey caterer (Lou Jacobi), his wife (Kay Medford) and daughter (Anita Gillette) temporarily take asylum in a U.S. embassy in a country much like Hungary. In one extraneous scene, the caterer dresses down an Arab oil sheik for being cruel to his Arab subjects. As the episode suggests, Jews have a slight edge in these comedies, perhaps reflecting the fact that there is a phenomenally low ticket demand for Broadway shows among Japanese gentlemen, Zulus and Arab sheiks.

Making his playwriting debut, Nightclub Comic Woody Allen fills the stage with a parade of gags that hurtle past like an insomniac's sheep, some woolly, some sheared and some weird. The evening is affluent with easy laughs, and yet curiously anemic in genuine humor. Lou Jacobi and Kay Medford are masters of ethnically styled comic delivery. He gives a line a built-in shrug. She is a one-woman keening committee, and her voice has a cold in its head. The couple's common burden is a Gentile nudnick of an embassy chief who has suffered every major disaster in his diplomatic posts except "a plague of locusts." An innocent abroad with a camera, Jacobi touches off a spy scare but outwits the entire Communist secret service by comedy's end. That's child's play for a caterer who was "the first to make bridegrooms out of potato salad." So is the play child's play.

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