Delirium Risibilitatis

By T.E. Kalem

SLY FOX

by LARRY GELBART

Broadway's cup of holiday cheer brims over with the arrival of Sly Fox. Based on Ben Jonson's Volpone, this wickedly farcical encounter between knaves and fools hides the tongue of moral satire in the cheek of roguery.

Greed is the theme of the play, greed so compelling as to raise it to an obsessive lust for money. In this reincarnation, the setting has become San Francisco in the 1890s. Volpone has become Foxwell J. Sly, played with shark's-tooth gusto by George C. Scott. Rich and childless. Sly feigns grave illness in order to arouse the hopes of avaricious, fawning and wealthy townsfolk who hope to become his heir.

By assuring each of these dupes that he is to be the sole heir, Sly's nimbly resourceful servant, Simon Able (Hector Elizondo), levies a handsome tribute in the form of anticipatory payments of one sort and another against the presumed inheritance.

One of the sheep to be fleeced, Abner Truckle (Bob Dishy), is so insanely jealous of his intensely religious and absorbingly beautiful wife (Trish Van Devere) that he will not let her out of the house. But when Able informs him that

Sly craves the ministrations of Mrs.

Truckle to nurse him through his last days, the money-mad husband delivers his wife to the supposedly harmless bed.

Dishy makes this ethical transition with such self-blinding suppleness that the effect is succulently comic.

Finally, Sly has Able announce his death, and the comedy takes a quan tum jump and delirium risibilitatis sets in. Returning to Broadway after an absence of ten years, Arthur Penn directs the evening's proceedings with the bounce of a trampoline. He must be good for his superb cast, for no one does any thing remotely wrong. Larry Gelbart's book is a naughty treasure laced with sassy one-liners and the ambience of bawdry that he brought to A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. As for the formidably gifted George C. Scott, he scales a summit of comic artistry in a stage career that seems to consist only of acting peaks.

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