Ergo

This play by Jakov Lind, an Austrian Jew who now lives in London, is a brutal, bitter, boring and unsubtle savaging of German--or is it Western?--culture. Fortunately, it is also a brilliant production, supervised by Central Park's old Shakespeare wallah, Joseph Papp.

Ergo consists of a series of episodic developments in the rivalry between a lusty, gusty bum called Wacholder, who wallows in a mountainous litter of crumpled papers and stacked cartons, and his neighbor Wurz. An obsessive-compulsive bacteriophobe, Wurz even dresses in a sterile white jump suit and dons a surgical mask and rubber gloves to have sexual intercourse with his masked, gloved wife.

Wacholder (Id?) tries various methods of getting rid of Wurz (Superego?): threatening letters, "nerve foam," a mass meeting to declare Wurz's nonexistence. Despite his increasing terror, Wurz refuses to leave. Eventually, he is turned into a domesticated animal by his wife and homosexual sons; Wacholder digs a hole in the sand and buries himself. Whether this symbolizes the end of the world, the decline of the West, or simply the end of the play, it comes as a relief.

If Ergo is not much of a pleasure to listen to, the staging makes it a delight to watch. The actors move swiftly and smoothly on, off, up, down and around the ingenious three-story set of Designer Ming Cho Lee. Their steps, gestures and facial miming are deftly coordinated with a mind-blowing razzle-dazzle of sound effects. Among the players, Jack Hollander is ebulliently disreputable as Wacholder, while Tom Aldredge makes an antiseptically uptight Wurz. The charmer of the production is Wurz's dimpled dumpling of a wife, played by Maxine Greene, 23, making her Manhattan debut--as a human being; her previous appearances have been in The Wizard of Oz as Toto the dog, and in Spurt of Blood as an orangutan.

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