Nudes and Nihilism

Unless one happens to be a voyeur, it is sexier to imagine plays with nudes than to actually see them. Sweet Eros is no exception to this rule, even though the naked girl (Sally Kirkland) in this off-Broadway one-acter by Terrence Mc-Nally is on view for almost an hour. The skin show is more abstract than erotic, and terribly sedate. The girl is bound to a chair and gagged most of the time, and initially clothed. Possibly the most exciting scene in this distinctly lethargic drama is the one in which she is undressed by her captor, a soft-spoken psychopath (Robert Drivas) who recounts in a nonstop monologue how the first girl he loved ditched him and then went mad, and how he abandoned another woman who then committed suicide. McNally's point seems to be that humans ought to manage the business of love with antlike efficiency and cool concupiscence.

A second one-acter called Witness finds McNally in fine comic and caustic fettle. Again a gagged victim is trussed up in a chair, this time a man. His captor (Joe Ponazecki) hopes to assassinate the President of the U.S. during a motorcade, and he wants a witness to his own sanity in committing the act. The stuff of madness has been crammed into this young would-be assassin's head, principally by avid newspaper reading and televiewing. He knows all about cabinet crises in Lebanon, but he doesn't know right from wrong. He hopes to resolve his baffled impotence with a high-powered rifle shot.

Another potential witness shows up on the scene, a hilariously surly window washer. Adroitly played by James Coco, he is a sharply drawn caricature of the New York City prole ("I may be 40 stories up but I'm the man in the street"), who coolly surveys the tied-up man straining to free his bonds and ignores his gagged pleas and his plight with magnificent aplomb. He intends to write a book about all the crazy things a window washer sees, and this is simply another usable item.

An atmosphere of hysterical malediction gradually infests the room. At the crucial moment, the young man loses his chance for infamous glory as a hundred assassins gun down the President in a communal murder. Despite its grisly theme, the play is acridly funny in its satire of a society that, in the playwright's view, is teetering toward terror, anarchy and nihilism.

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