Babbling Dervish

By T.E.K.

DR. HERO

by ISRAEL HOROVITZ

Imagine life as a sneaker-shod Dionysian ballet, reeling from the Marx Brothers to Samuel Beckett, from Madison Avenue to the groves of academe, from the incontinence of diaper days to the impotence of a palsied hand of poker in an old folks' death house. That will give you some brief notion of Dr. Hero. Yes, the central figure is our old friend and sometime bore, Everyman; but dismiss your initial, legitimate worries. This Everyman is no gullible Candide looking for the best of all possible worlds, no dour Diogenes straining for a glimpse of an honest man by lamplight. This guy is as slyly glib as a carnival barker, as horny as Portnoy, as resilient as a trampoline. Yet he knows Shakespeare's prophecy for Everyman: "We owe God a death."

Playwright Israel Horovitz (The Indian Wants the Bronx, Line, Acrobats) is prolific, ebullient, agile and tenacious. He is a stage animal who has not yet exercised his full territorial imperative. One of Horovitz's problems is that his characters are a shade too volatile and voluble--a playgoer cannot easily enter the heart of a babbling dervish. Another Horovitz problem: a sustained narrative line. He tends to interrupt one story in order to tell another. In Dr. Hero, he is somewhat luckier, since the chronicle is dictated by nature-- birth, adolescence, love, marriage, a job, old age, death.

The concept is not new, but Horovitz handles each episode with ironic and ribald good humor and a wryly understated sense of mortality. Hero (that's his name) is not shy about wanting to be the greatest man on earth. He takes all the lumps of an antihero, but with a redeeming gallantry devoid of self-pity. Deftly played by Jim Milton, Hero acts like a jaunty M.C. in the cabaret of his life.

The play is highly exhilarating, with two excruciatingly funny sequences. In one of them, Hero cons a board of professors into giving him his doctorate after an absurd display of bogus scholarship. One dotty, dozing old Dickensian expert confuses every fifth or sixth line of dialogue with the title of a Dickens novel, which is fairly hilarious all by itself. Another laugh-bulging scene is a Madison Avenue group-think probe, complete with gestures `a la charades, as to why a cleaning company's detergent spray produces mud when a housewife uses it.

The three-woman, four-man cast supporting Milton is delightful and skillful. While it is lofty of Horovitz to call Dr. Hero "a tragic farce," it is only just to call it an effervescently amusing show. . T.E. K.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.