Barometric Eye on Suburbia

By T. E. Kalem

ABSENT FRIENDS by ALAN AYCKBOURN

To be inspired is worth less to a playwright than to be obsessed. With Eugene O'Neill, it is the isolated torment of the soul's loneliness. With Arthur Miller, it is the nagging quest for justice. With Tennessee Williams, it is the poignant cry of the violated heart. And though Britain's Alan Ayckbourn does not rank with these playwrights, he, too, has his ambient obsession. Again and again (Absurd Person Singular, The Norman Conquests and now Absent Friends) he dwells on the crimping horizons and absurdist conventional fritter of suburban life.

No one knows the subject better.

Ayckbourn can spot the shifting pressures of money and status with a barometric eye. His ear has perfect pitch for the recycled banalities that pass for conversation and the kind of gossip that stirs marital tempests in provincial teapots. Rarely have Ayckbourn's intelligence, nimble comic flair and sympathetic imagination been more acutely on display than in Absent Friends, which gets a rousingly animated U.S. premiere at Washington's Kennedy Center.

A tea party is being thrown for Colin (Eli Wallach), out of sympathy. His fiancee of 14 months has just drowned. Diana (Anne Jackson) gets the group together. She feels that Colin's "friends" ought to cheer him up, even though none of them has seen him for three years. When Colin arrives, it is clear that he is past cheering. He is a human cork, with matching brain, who could bob merrily on a tidal wave of disaster. Grief is all Greek to him.

He starts by passing around photos of his dead fiancee for general approbation. As a catalytic agent full of "power of positive thinking" jargon, he soon reduces everyone either to tears or to hysterics. With blithe incomprehension, he unmasks torpedoed marriages, a joyless adulteress (Dale Hodges), blasted careers, lace-curtain carnage.

In the pivotal role of Colin, Eli Wallach outdoes the customary reliability of his performances. Immunized against reality and insatiable in his do-gooding instincts, Wallach's Colin is an atomic pile of innocence. T.E.Kalem

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