Pinter Patter

By T.E.K.

DUCK VARIATIONS and SEXUAL PERVERSITY IN CHICAGO by DAVID MAMET

For the past few seasons the Theater of the Absurd has seemed like an endangered dramatic species. Purebred examples of the genre, with their vaudevillian non sequiturs, wryly autumnal philosophizing about existence and wackily disconcerting knee-jerk humor, have become rare. In part, audiences have adjusted to the metaphysical void that permeates absurdist drama, the absence of meaning and purpose that so puzzled and infuriated them when the early Pinter plays appeared.

In Duck Variations, a bright young playwright, David Mamet, 28, displays the Pinter trait of wearing word masks to shield feelings and of defying communication in the act of communicating.

Two garrulous old Jewish men, played with great sensitivity by Mike Kellin and Michael Egan, sit on a bench facing Lake Michigan and talk like lobotomized Talmudic scholars about the habits of ducks and other subjects of which they know virtually nothing yet speculate about with endless comic invention. What emerges is a vivid sense of their friendship, the fear of solitude, the inexorable toll of expiring lives.

The toll exacted in Sexual Perversity in Chicago is that of a torpedoed love affair. It might be called "Four's a Crowd."

The boy (Peter Riegert) and the girl (Jane Anderson) have each been involved in cozily domestic relationships with homosexual roommates. Their chance to go straight, as it were, is blighted by the cruel disparagement of the new lovers by their former partners (F. Murray Abraham and Gina Rogers).

This may not sound very funny, but at off-Broadway's Cherry Lane Theater, a most nimble cast unleashes a hailstorm of laughter.

T.E.K.

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