Three Authors in Search of an Act

The work is billed as one play by three authors, but Morning, Noon and Night is merely an umbrella covering three disparate statements.

In Morning, the first and best, a Negro family takes a miraculous pill that turns them Caucasian overnight. The father and mother immediately start putting down their black neighbors, but their son and daughter refuse to join in the whiteballing. When a racist threatens them, they angrily announce that black is not only beautiful but necessary, smear him with black paint and begin advancing, tarbrushes in hand, on the audience. Playwright Israel Horovitz thoroughly comprehends Freud's dictum that laughter is a release from tension. With fusillades of obscenities and insult humor, he keeps the audience too jittery and hysterical to realize that they have only been watching an intellectual Don Rickles.

Noon and Night play it safer and softer. Terrence McNally redoes French farce `a la Grove Press in a play where all the vice is versa. A heterosexual is mistaken for a homosexual, a pair of mild Babbitts turn out to be, in tact, sadistic leather fetishists, a droning housewife is an aspiring nymphomaniac. After a number of legitimate laughs, McNally tries to be momentous in a conclusion about the necessity of love, but that message is articulated every week on Laugh-In: "Whatever turns you on . . ." Night is by Leonard Melfi, considered one of off-Broadway's emerging playwrights. At a pseudo-lyric funeral, a group mourns the loss of their blowhard leader. A new con-mannerist appears, spouting worthless dreams, and they all follow him off in a witless parody of resurrection.

On a String. Director Theodore Mann manipulates his actors like a sergeant drilling raw recruits. Whenever the action flags, he stiffly strings the players before the footlights, as if for a military inspection. Even so, the players almost undo the damage. Sorrell Booke's three parts are written as caricatures of middle age, but at least he renders the caricatures with the bite of David Levine.

Robert Klein swings from race to race, from shy intellectual to swaggering blusterer, with the ease of a metronome. It is Charlotte Rae, looking and sounding like a Valkyrie telescoped into a dwarf, who provides the evening's best performance as a black woman who gets bleached in Morning. She shakes off her origins and becomes a haughty, fake-elegant white woman; irrepressibly, she grabs a microphone and begins warbling a song, White Like Me. But before she has finished, all the skin has been stripped away, and in a manic Mahalia Jackson finish she delivers a jolt of straight soul in the most brilliant transformation since Zero Mostel became a rhinoceros.

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