Humorist Goes AWOL

THE GOOD DOCTOR by NEIL SIMON

Except for the rare and freakish abnormality, nature never violates the integrity of its forms. One cannot imagine, for example, nature grafting a giraffe's neck onto the body of a hippopotamus and topping it off with a chipmunk's head. Yet man, the born tinkerer, is forever fashioning hybrids out of his art forms. With reckless profusion, novels are turned into plays, plays into musicals, musicals into movies and vice versa. This is partly a matter of crass commerce, partly of dried-up imagination, and partly of pure madness.

In the case of Neil Simon, such tinkering may more accurately be described as an affectionate whim, an experimental doodle by a humorist who has chosen to go temporarily AWOL. He has taken some Chekhov short stories, and with a fond, undeviating respect, adapted them into a kind of narrative revue. The show is knit together by a commentator, "The Writer" (Christopher Plummer), who is made up to look very much like the great and good dramatist and doctor.

The first thing that comes to mind is that if Chekhov had thought that any of these stories had the makings of plays, even one-acters, he would have written them that way. In second-guessing Chekhov, Simon merely confirms that Chekhov made the right decision in the first place. A further drawback is that Simon and Chekhov are not on the same wave length of humor. Simon's forte is the self-deprecatory one-liner with a New York Jewish accent. Chekhov's humor contains a deep-flowing Slavic melancholy together with a riotous farcicality. Compassionately, his work embraces the innate foolishness in all of humanity. Atmosphere and nuance, all-important in Chekhov, are not Simon's strength, and having a sort of Fiddler on the Roof band concertizing on stage for 20 minutes before curtain time does not a Russia make.

The sketches are pretty wispy stuff, ranging from a government clerk sneezing on a general at a most inopportune moment to a dental student ecstatically extracting a tooth to a virago making life pluperfect hell for a gout-prone bank manager. The second half of the show is distinctly brighter and breezier than the first. The entire cast is not only exemplary, but extraordinarily versatile, and Christopher Plummer, as usual, provides superior acting with facile, enviable ease.

"Doc" Simon, as he is known, has provided so much pleasure to so many playgoers over the years that he is certainly entitled to prescribe a brand of entertainment that exerts a tonic effect on him. If the comic medicine seems a trifle watery on this occasion, it still possesses more potency than the dramatic quack remedies so often fobbed off on Broadway.

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